Build a universal wheel from setup.py

Question

How do I build a universal wheel from setup.py? I would prefer not to pass in the --universal option each time or to create a setup.cfg file just for this option.

I am aware of the workaround in https://stackoverflow.com/a/35112241/6947337, but is there a clean way of doing this without creating a setup.cfg file temporarily?

Answer 1

setup.py's setup() supports an options argument to pass options to any command. It is a dictionary of command names and command options. You can instruct it to build a universal wheel by providing any truthy value accepted by strtobool e.g.

setup(options={'bdist_wheel':{'universal':'1'}})

or

setup(options={'bdist_wheel':{'universal':True}})

See also https://github.com/python/cpython/blob/master/Lib/distutils/dist.py#L247

If you only want to make a Python 3 compatible wheel, you don't have to pass any argument. The wheel will automatically be tagged as py3 if it it is built in a Python 3 interpreter.