Machwave is a Python library for chemical propulsion simulation. The library makes it easy to model solid or biliquid rocket engines, analyse performance and integrate the results into trajectory simulations.

Getting Started

Installation

Install Machwave using pip:

pip install machwave

macOS prerequisite: gfortran

Machwave depends on rocketcea, which does not publish macOS wheels on PyPI. On macOS, pip therefore builds rocketcea from source and needs a Fortran compiler. Homebrew's gcc formula installs only versioned binaries (e.g. gfortran-15), so an unversioned gfortran symlink must be added to PATH before pip install machwave:

brew install gcc
ln -sf "$(ls "$(brew --prefix)"/bin/gfortran-* | sort -V | tail -n 1)" "$(brew --prefix)/bin/gfortran"

Linux and Windows users do not need this step — rocketcea ships prebuilt wheels for those platforms.

Documentation

The full documentation is available at felipebogaertsm.github.io/machwave.

Development Setup

If you're contributing to Machwave, you'll need uv for dependency management.

Installing uv

macOS / Linux:

curl -LsSf https://astral.sh/uv/install.sh | sh

Windows (PowerShell):

powershell -ExecutionPolicy ByPass -c "irm https://astral.sh/uv/install.ps1 | iex"

For more details, visit the official uv installation guide.

Clone and Install

Clone the repository and install dependencies:

git clone https://github.com/felipebogaertsm/machwave.git
cd machwave
make install

Publishing a New Release

1. Create a release on GitHub with a tag matching vX.Y.Z (e.g. v1.2.0). The version is derived automatically from the git tag.

2. The publish workflow builds the package and publishes it to PyPI via trusted publishing (OIDC).