Help me understand the differences in wheel when using python -m build vs hatch build

[Wim-De-Clercq]

I have a project with a frontend folder, and upon building the wheel I wish to only include the compiled/packed dist folder, and no other javascript sources.

To do this, I have a build configuration as followed:
(There is no other tool.hatch.build.xyz configuration)

[tool.hatch.build.targets.wheel]
# In the wheel we want to have atramhasis in the root as python module.
packages = [
    "/atramhasis",
]
# In the wheel we do not need the frontend sources. We provide the dist.
exclude = [
    "/atramhasis/static/admin"
]
# these folders are (partially) in gitignore and would otherwise not be part of the builds
artifacts = [
    "/atramhasis/static/admin/dist",
]

And then, when building the wheel in different ways:

1 python -m build --wheel

$ python -m build --wheel
* Creating virtualenv isolated environment...
* Installing packages in isolated environment... (hatch-fancy-pypi-readme, hatchling)
* Getting build dependencies for wheel...
* Building wheel...
Successfully built atramhasis-0.0.1-py3-none-any.whl

The resulting wheel contains (among other things)

.
├── atramhasis
│   ├── static
│   │   ├── admin
│   │   │   └── dist

This is good ✔️

2 python -m build

$ python -m build
* Creating virtualenv isolated environment...
* Installing packages in isolated environment... (hatch-fancy-pypi-readme, hatchling)
* Getting build dependencies for sdist...
* Building sdist...
* Building wheel from sdist
* Creating virtualenv isolated environment...
* Installing packages in isolated environment... (hatch-fancy-pypi-readme, hatchling)
* Getting build dependencies for wheel...
* Building wheel...
Successfully built atramhasis-0.0.1.tar.gz and atramhasis-0.0.1-py3-none-any.whl

The resulting wheel contains (among other things)

.
├── atramhasis
│   ├── static

static contains no admin folder. This is unexpected.
I thought maybe the "conflict" of the artifacts being a subfolder of an exclude folder would be the reason, but even if I remove the exclude altogether, the dist folder is not present (but admin folder is)

3 hatch build

$ hatch build
[sdist]
dist/atramhasis-0.0.1.tar.gz

[wheel]
dist/atramhasis-0.0.1-py3-none-any.whl

The resulting wheel contains (among other things)

.
├── atramhasis
│   ├── static
│   │   ├── admin
│   │   │   └── dist

This is good ✔️

(it's also much faster than python -m build because I assume it skips the virtualenv setup)

---

So what exactly is causing run number 2 to give me a different wheel?

[Wim-De-Clercq]

I have created a small project to illustrate and recreate my problem.

https://github.com/Wim-De-Clercq/testingrepo/tree/hatch/build-question

After cloning:

# To create a fake "dist" artifact
$ python -m my_module

Compare the wheel builds

$ python -m build --wheel

VS

$ python -m build

[ofek]

The reason is build (without arguments) first builds the source distribution then unpacks that to build the wheel. Therefore, the artifacts needs to be defined in both sections (or globally).

[Wim-De-Clercq]

aha, so it's probably going to be fixed once I create a wheel buildhook to actually create my artifacts.

[Wim-De-Clercq]

Update, yes, I can confirm that once i added a [tool.hatch.build.targets.wheel.hooks.custom] buildhook to create the artifacts, it all works as expected.

Cheers.