Python Wheels

Python wheels is zip file with package content as opposed to source distribution. It’s faster to install than the normal tar(or whatever).

The article has really good description for wheels.

For me, wheels are most helpful for installing packages on air-gapped machines. I can just copy the wheels and install. These are the steps based on SO.

export PD=/var/tmp/python-deps
mkdir $PD
python -m pip download wheel setuptools cocotb  setuptools_scm -d $PD

And to install on another machine

cd $PD
pip3 install --user --no-index cocotb-1.5.1.tar.gz  --find-links file://$PD

From pip help

  --no-index                  Ignore package index (only looking at --find-links URLs instead).
  -f, --find-links <url>      If a url or path to an html file, then parse for links to archives. If a local path or file:// url
                              that's a directory, then look for archives in the directory listing.