Tires

A CLI tool to download wheels in parallel.

tires is a solution for mirroring packages. Tools like bandersnatch will download every PyPI version of a package, which can be overkill if you want only a single version of a package. bandersnatch also does not download the dependencies. On the other hand, pip wheel downloads wheels for your package and its dependencies, and nothing more, but the downloads are sequential.

tires seeks to be something in the middle . tires compiles the dependencies listed in a toml file with uv pip compile (fast/parallel due to uv), enumerates the unique packages, then downloads and, if needed, builds the wheels with uvx -p <python-version> pip wheel --no-deps in parallel. Multiple versions of the same package, for different python versions, can be downloaded. Wheels are built only for the current platform.

Installation

uv

uv tool install tires

pip

pip install tires

Usage

The following will download wheels for packages listed in manifest.toml (can be named anything.toml) to wheels/.

tires get /path/to/manifest.toml /path/to/wheels/

Manifest File Format

The manifest file is a TOML file with a [packages] table. Each package is defined as a key under [packages] with a table of options.

Options

• versions: A list of version specifiers (strings). Each specifier can be:
  • An exact version (e.g., "1.26.4")
  • A version range (e.g., ">=70,<73")
  • An empty string (meaning "latest")
• python: A list of Python version strings (e.g., ["3.10", "3.12"]) for which to build wheels.
• torch-backend: (Optional) A list of torch back ends (e.g., ["cu126", "auto"]) as supported by uv.
• index: (Optional) A custom package index URL.

Examples

See the examples/ directory for sample manifest files.

Basic manifest (examples/manifest.toml)

# Basic usage. Can specify a PyPI package name or github url.
[packages]
scipy = {}  # just a package name from PyPI
'git+https://github.com/lanl/tires.git' = {}  # GitHub URL to python package

# Inline specification of package versions and python versions
# The empty string triggers download of the latest numpy version.
numpy = { versions = ["2.4.1", "1.26.4", ""], python = ["3.10", "3.13"] }

# Table specification of package versions and python versions 
[packages.setuptools]
versions = [">=70,<73", ">79", ">81"] # can specify versions and bounds
python = ["3.12"] # can specify python version

# Can specify torch backend, like in uv
[packages.torch]
torch-backend = ["cu126"]
python = ["3.12"]

Notes

• If versions is not specified, it defaults to the latest stable release version.

• If python is not specified, it defaults to the Python versions provided to the tires get command (or the default: "3.10 3.11 3.12 3.13 3.14").

• An empty string in versions ("") is interpreted as "latest".

• Version specifiers that do not start with an operator (like ==, >=, etc.) are treated as exact versions and will be prefixed with ==.

• Git dependencies can be specified directly as a string (e.g., 'git+https://github.com/lanl/tires.git' = {}) or as a key with options.

• The toml file must not list the same package more than once. For example, the following is not allowed.

  numpy = { python = ["3.11"] }
  numpy = { python = ["3.10"] }

  You must rewrite as

  numpy = { python = ["3.10", "3.11"] }

  However, including both scipy and numpy is fine, even though scipy depends on numpy.

LANL Software Release Information

• O5084