.WHL

Introduction

A .whl file, a wheel, is a built package for Python. Installing it means little more than unpacking it into the right folder, with nothing to compile, so most packages on the Python Package Index (PyPI) are published as wheels. A package with compiled extension modules publishes a separate wheel for each Python version, operating system and processor it supports; a pure-Python package needs only one.

The file name says which systems a wheel is for: name-version-pythontag-abitag-platformtag.whl, such as numpy-2.1.0-cp312-cp312-win_amd64.whl for CPython 3.12 on 64-bit Windows, or requests-2.32.3-py3-none-any.whl for any Python 3.

Structure

A wheel is a ZIP archive. The package’s files sit at the top, laid out as they will be installed. Beside them is a name-version.dist-info folder holding METADATA (the name, version, summary and dependencies, in email-header style), WHEEL (the wheel format version and the tool that built it), RECORD (every file in the wheel with its SHA-256 hash and size) and, when the package installs commands, entry_points.txt.

requests-2.32.3-py3-none-any.whl
├── requests/
│   ├── __init__.py
│   └── …
└── requests-2.32.3.dist-info/
    ├── METADATA
    ├── WHEEL
    ├── RECORD
    └── top_level.txt

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