How do I list the files inside a python wheel?

Question

I\'m poking around the various options to setup.py for including non-python files, and they\'re somewhat less than intuitive. I\'d like to be able to check the

Answer 1

As others have pointed out in the answers, any .whl file can be extracted using unzip or by right clicking on the file and extracting using the Extract Here graphical interface in Ubuntu/Debian systems.

After extracting, one can inspect the source code of .py files and the contents of metadata files which will be located in library-name-with-version.dist-info directory. However, the source code of shared object (.so) files can not be inspected since that's a binary file.

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Another handy option would be to use the wheel-inspect package which is specifically built for this purpose. The description of the package is stated as:

wheel-inspect examines Python wheel files & *.dist-info directories and outputs various information about their contents as JSON-serializable objects.

A sample command is:

$ wheel2json some_lib_wheel_file.whl

That would spit out the contents in a json file. If this json file needs to be stored locally, then redirect the output to a json file.

$ wheel2json some_lib_wheel_file.whl > some_lib.json