Installing the new wheel

After building MGET as a Python wheel, you can build MGET’s documentation or run MGET’s tests. Before doing so, you must install the new wheel. You have two options for doing this.

Option 1: Install the wheel in the traditional way

With this option, you install the newly-built wheel using pip. Just follow the installation instructions on the home page to install MGET into the virtual environment of your choice. If MGET is already installed, you’ll need to uninstall it first as described in those instructions. When it comes time to install the new wheel, rather than referencing the mget3 package in the pip install command, put the path to the new .whl file instead.

You must use this option if you’re on Windows with ArcGIS and want to test MGET with ArcGIS. This is because you built the wheel in a virtual environment created by the Python you installed from python.org but now need to install MGET into a virtual environment created with ArcGIS’s copy of conda. If you’re not on Windows, or you are but don’t want to test MGET with ArcGIS, you can use Option 2 instead, if desired.

Option 2: Install MGET as an “editable install”

With an editable install, pip configures your virtual environment to be able import MGET’s package (GeoEco) directly from the source tree. The advantage of this approach is that you can make changes to Python files in the source tree and then immediately build MGET’s documentation or run MGET’s tests without building and installing the wheel again. It is faster to develop, document, and test code this way than with Option 1. But it requires that you install MGET into the same virtual environment that you used to build it. That will not be possible if you’re trying to test MGET with ArcGIS, which requires installing MGET to an ArcGIS conda environment. In that case, you must use Option 1.

To proceed with an editable install, you first need to ensure that all of the software prerequisites are met, as listed in the installation instructions on the home page for your platform. Then, rather than using the pip install command shown in those instructions, run the following command instead. Do it from the same virtual environment you used to build MGET. You must be in the MGET root directory. On Linux:

python3 -m pip install -e .

On Windows, replace python3 with python.

You only need to do this once after creating your virtual environment; after doing it the first time, any changes you make to the source tree are automatically visible the next time you import the package.