Programmatically check if wheel is compatible with Python installation

Question

Is it possible to programmatically check if a wheel (whl) is compatible with the chosen Python installation before attempting to install?

I'm making an automated packages installer (packages needed for my Python project to work), and I need to only attempt to install compatible pkgs, so if there are errors, I know they are only from the compatible modules and I should see what happened (not errors also from incompatible pkgs, which I wouldn't care). Example: I'd have wheels for Python 3.5 and 3.7, and in a 3.5 installation, 3.7 wheels could not be tried to be installed.

I've tried pkginfo ( https://pypi.org/project/pkginfo/ ), but on wheel.supported_platforms , it returns an empty array and I can't do anything with that (a wheel with "any" or with "win32" on their name in the platform part, returned an empty array, so I can't use that, it seems).

Also tried the output from python -m pip debug --verbose , but the following appears:

WARNING: This command is only meant for debugging. Do not use this with automation for parsing and getting these details, since the output and options of this command may change without no
tice.

This makes the command not possible to use, even though bellow that it prints the "Compatible tags", which more or less I could use to determine if a wheel is supported or not from its name. Example of those "Compatible tags" in a Python array:

['cp39-cp39-win_amd64', 'cp39-abi3-win_amd64', 'cp39-none-win_amd64', 'cp38-abi3-win_amd64', 'cp37-abi3-win_amd64', 'cp36-abi3-win_amd64', 'cp35-abi3-win_amd64', 'cp34-abi3-win_amd64', 'cp
33-abi3-win_amd64', 'cp32-abi3-win_amd64', 'py39-none-win_amd64', 'py3-none-win_amd64', 'py38-none-win_amd64', 'py37-none-win_amd64', 'py36-none-win_amd64', 'py35-none-win_amd64', 'py34-no
ne-win_amd64', 'py33-none-win_amd64', 'py32-none-win_amd64', 'py31-none-win_amd64', 'py30-none-win_amd64', 'cp39-none-any', 'py39-none-any', 'py3-none-any', 'py38-none-any', 'py37-none-any
', 'py36-none-any', 'py35-none-any', 'py34-none-any', 'py33-none-any', 'py32-none-any', 'py31-none-any', 'py30-none-any']

With, for example, "pyHook-1.5.1-cp36-cp36m-win32.whl", I could check the name and see if it's compatible or not (except because of the warning above...).

Any other ideas?

Thanks in advance for any help!

EDIT: I could go manually and pull things from the name and hard-code the some possibilities I see on documentation, like "win32" and "win_amd64" (as I did before), but then I'd need to know exactly all the possibilities that the parts of the name can have (I saw a cool expression on the documentation: "eg" - which means there are more than the mentioned things) and have a lot of work on that. I was hoping there was already someone that had made such thing (maybe even Python itself has some way in any of its internal packages).

Answer 1

You can do this using packaging .

pip install packaging

An example code to get the tags similar to how you got from pip would be:

from packaging.tags import sys_tags

tags = sys_tags()

print([str(tag) for tag in tags])
# ['cp39-cp39-manylinux_2_33_x86_64', 'cp39-cp39-manylinux_2_32_x86_64', 'cp39-cp39-manylinux_2_31_x86_64', ..... , 'py31-none-any', 'py30-none-any']

Of course, you can do much more things programmatically with the above variable tags :

>>> tags = sys_tags()
>>> for tag in list(tags)[:3]:
...     print(tag.interpreter, tag.abi, tag.platform)
... 
cp39 cp39 manylinux_2_33_x86_64
cp39 cp39 manylinux_2_32_x86_64
cp39 cp39 manylinux_2_31_x86_64

For more in-depth documentation, check: https://packaging.pypa.io/en/latest/tags.html#packaging.tags.sys_tags