Why can I not create a wheel in python?

Install the wheel package first:

pip install wheel

The documentation isn't overly clear on this, but "the wheel project provides a bdist_wheel command for setuptools" actually means "the wheel package...".

I also ran into the error message invalid command 'bdist_wheel'

It turns out the package setup.py used distutils rather than setuptools. Changing it as follows enabled me to build the wheel.

#from distutils.core import setup
from setuptools import setup

Update your setuptools, too.

pip install setuptools --upgrade

If that fails too, you could try with additional --force flag.

I also ran into this all of a sudden, after it had previously worked, and it was because I was inside a virtualenv, and wheel wasn’t installed in the virtualenv.