Build and verify a release wheel

This page is for contributors and release maintainers, not first-time users. It explains how to validate the wheel artifact that a release process would distribute. For ordinary development and tutorials, use the editable source-checkout installation instead.

Purpose

A wheel is a packaged .whl artifact built from this checkout. Testing it in a fresh environment verifies that the artifact contains the required package files, declares the needed dependencies, and exposes the rfgen command. An editable install can mask those packaging errors because it imports directly from the checkout.

When to run it

Run this check after changing packaging metadata, dependencies, entry points, or files included in the distribution, and before preparing a release. The Documentation CI journey runs the same installation route automatically for the documented local examples; this command is the maintainer-facing manual check.

Run the check

These commands are POSIX-shell commands. Run uv build from the repository root, then run the remaining commands from a new directory outside the checkout. The find command selects one built wheel. The direct reference in the install command requests the torchsig and sionna extras from that exact artifact.

uv build
mkdir -p /tmp/rfgen-wheel-check
cd /tmp/rfgen-wheel-check
uv venv --python 3.11 .venv-wheel
. .venv-wheel/bin/activate
wheel=$(find /path/to/rf-data-generation/dist -maxdepth 1 -name 'rfgen-*.whl' -print -quit)
test -n "$wheel"
uv pip install "rfgen[torchsig,sionna] @ file://$wheel"
python -c 'import rfgen; print(rfgen.__file__)'
rfgen --help

rfgen.__file__ should point into .venv-wheel/.../site-packages/rfgen/, not the source checkout. rfgen --help should complete successfully. If either check fails, do not release the wheel: rebuild after correcting the package contents, dependency metadata, or command entry point.

For the complete installed-wheel product journey, see the installed-wheel E2E quality gate. For documentation commands and the automated documentation journey, see Documentation Quality Checks.