Produce a Python Wheel without sources with CLI option --exclude-source-files

setup.py

import os
from distutils import log
from setuptools import setup, find_packages
from setuptools.command.build_py import build_py as _build_py
from wheel.bdist_wheel import bdist_wheel as _bdist_wheel
from wheel.pep425tags import get_impl_ver


class build_py(_build_py):
    def initialize_options(self):
        _build_py.initialize_options(self)
        wc = self.get_finalized_command("bdist_wheel", 0)
        self.exclude_source_files = wc and wc.exclude_source_files

    def finalize_options(self):
        if self.exclude_source_files:
            self.force = 1
            self.compile = 1
        _build_py.finalize_options(self)

    def byte_compile(self, files):
        _build_py.byte_compile(self, files)
        if self.exclude_source_files:
            for file in files:
                if file.endswith('.py'):
                    os.unlink(file)
                    log.info('removing source file %s', file)


class bdist_wheel(_bdist_wheel):
    _bdist_wheel.user_options.append(('exclude-source-files', None, "remove all .py files from the generated wheel"))

    def initialize_options(self):
        _bdist_wheel.initialize_options(self)
        self.python_tag = None
        self.exclude_source_files = False

    def finalize_options(self):
        if self.python_tag is None:
            if self.exclude_source_files:
                self.python_tag = 'py' + get_impl_ver()
            else:
                self.python_tag = 'py' + get_impl_ver()[0]
        _bdist_wheel.finalize_options(self)


setup(
    name='package name',
    # ...,
    setup_requires=['wheel>=0.30;python_version>="2.7"', 'wheel==0.29;python_version<"2.7"'],
    cmdclass={"build_py": build_py, "bdist_wheel": bdist_wheel}
)

Dug a bit deeper and it appears that moving the compiled files into the distribution directory would require overloading cache_from_source in importlib\_bootstrap_external.py and is likely to be more of a hassle than just executing pyc_wheel.

@ophers I'm running 3.7.