Wheel File Type

Different Types of Wheels

As touched on throughout this tutorial, there are several different variations of wheels, and the wheel’s type is reflected in its filename:

• A universal wheel contains py2.py3-none-any.whl. It supports both Python 2 and Python 3 on any OS and platform. The majority of wheels listed on the Python Wheels website are universal wheels.
• A pure-Python wheel contains either py3-none-any.whl or py2.none-any.whl. It supports either Python 3 or Python 2, but not both. It’s otherwise the same as a universal wheel, but it’ll be labeled with either py2 or py3 rather than the py2.py3 label.
• A platform wheel supports a specific Python version and platform. It contains segments indicating a specific Python version, ABI, operating system, or architecture.

The differences between wheel types are determined by which version(s) of Python they support and whether they target a specific platform. Here’s a condensed summary of the differences between wheel variations:

Reference