Publish steps to build a pip whl

[chanderson0]

Looking at the docs for pip installation, it's clear that there is some way to turn the packages from IsaacLab into a single pip-installable wheel. However, I can't find the process to do so. Can this be published as part of this repository?

Our use case is working from a fork of IsaacLab but being able to publish it into Python virtualenvs for other projects.

[RandomOakForest]

Thank you for posting this. We reviewed this, and think the recommended way is to use the source code following the pip installation as in the docs. Alternatively, it may be useful to have a docker container with your environment as needed, and volume-mount the Isaac Lab directories as needed. It will give you a way to develop while keeping your setup easy to deploy.

[chanderson0]

Thanks for taking a look!

The pip install workflow in the docs is fine unless you need to change something about IsaacLab itself: fixing bugs, for example. Since it forces you to use a precompiled wheel, IsaacLab is not itself modifiable unlike in the conda workflows (which are harder to make repeatable).

For what it's worth, I was able to replicate the published wheel with very little changing in IsaacLab.

• Two files changed in this repo: https://github.com/isaac-sim/IsaacLab/compare/main...chanderson0:IsaacLab:ca/whl?expand=1
• An example pyproject.toml using uv to consume this definition: https://gist.github.com/chanderson0/046cb11f68b8797711982b4ecac0bcfd

We will probably move forward with this, but it would be better if we were sharing the same infrastructure as the published wheel.