wheels CI: reduce CI time

Description

The wheels-publish workflow is responsible for a pretty narrow purpose... downloading wheel artifacts built in CI and publishing them to package repositories (like https://pypi.anaconda.org/rapidsai-wheels-nightly/simple/).

It really only needs a Python interpreter and a couple tools like twine, the anaconda CLI, and the gh CLI.

Today, it uses the rapidsai/ci-wheel container images (build from rapidsai/ci-imgs), which are around 4.5 GB compressed (https://hub.docker.com/r/rapidsai/ci-wheel/tags).

The time to run that workflow is dominated by container-image pulling. For example, look at a recent wheels-publish-cudf job (build link):

This issue tracks the work of designing and implementing changes to speed that up. Maybe some mix of:

• using a slimmer container image (or just ubuntu-latest / ubuntu-slim runners without a container)
• removing telemetry
• using a shallow git checkout

Benefits of this work

• reduced end-to-end time for RAPIDS nightly pipeline (https://github.com/rapidsai/workflows/actions/workflows/nightly-pipeline.yaml)
• reduced time to roll out a change across all of RAPIDS (related: https://github.com/rapidsai/build-planning/issues/238)
• reduced usage of CI resources

Acceptance Criteria

• wheels-publish workflows are faster than they were on February 17, 2026

Ideas

Just dumping some ideas here, this is not an implementation plan:

• use ubuntu-latest / ubuntu-slim GitHub-hosted runners
• use a smaller container image (like python:latest or python:3.13-slim)
• create a new rapidsai/ci-wheel-publishing or similar image
  • publishing a new image does bring new legal / compliance requirements though, this might be a lot of effort
• fiddle with the rapidsai/ci-wheel image
  • different compression?
  • fewer layers?
  • removing unused things?
• use shallow git checkouts
• remove telemetry (this workflow doesn't benefit much from it)

Approach

Related changes made since this started:

• remove docs files and build artifacts, consolidate RUN steps (https://github.com/rapidsai/ci-imgs/pull/368)
• clear caches, remove unnecessary pyenv stuff (https://github.com/rapidsai/ci-imgs/pull/394
• more parallelization, skip unnecessary stuff like docs and tests in source builds of CPython and its dependencies (https://github.com/rapidsai/ci-imgs/pull/425)
• stop shipping llvm in Ubuntu citestwheel images (https://github.com/rapidsai/ci-imgs/pull/428)
• remove source checkouts and telemetry from package-publishing jobs (https://github.com/rapidsai/shared-workflows/pull/585)
• use a different, faster-to-pull base image for wheel-publishing (#586)
• use nvidia/cuda:*-base-* or similar for citestwheel (https://github.com/rapidsai/ci-imgs/pull/408)

Notes

N/A