Making pip installations faster with wheel

I recently noticed the following message in Sentry’s pip installation step:

Using legacy ‘setup.py install’ for openapi-core, since package ‘wheel’ is not installed.

Upon some investigation, I noticed that the package wheel was not being installed. After making some changes, I can now guarantee that our development environment installs it by default and it’s given us about 40–50% speed gain.

Timings from before and after installing wheel

The screenshot above shows the steps from two different Github workflows; it installs Sentry’s Python packages inside of a fresh virtualenv and the pip cache is available.

If you see a message saying that wheelpackage is not installed, make sure to attend to it!