At some point, we may decide that the application or library we are developing is ready for release. In that case, there are a few things we can do to help make our application easier to install and use for our potential users.

In this chapter, we’ll briefly discuss some of the steps in that process and the decisions we may need to make along the way. This is not meant to be a full guide to releasing a professional piece of software, but it should help you navigate some of the first steps toward making your application available to a wider audience.

In this chapter, we’ll discuss these topics and terms:

• Software release
• Software license
• Metadata
• Documentation
• Building a JAR file (Java)
• Building a Wheel file (Python)
• Posting a Release on GitHub
• Publishing a Release on a Repository

After this chapter, we’ll also have a short example project that goes through these steps, allowing you to create your own software release!