Inspect locally

The same rig inspect you'd use to peek at someone else's rig is the last gate before publishing your own.

rig pack
rig inspect ./dist/<name>-<version>.rig.tgz

What to look for

Manifest section

Confirm:

[rig].name, author, version are right.
[env].required matches what your scripts actually read.
[tools].required includes everything you actually shell out to.
[mcp].servers is the full list (compare against .mcp.json).
[permissions] doesn't grant more than your rig actually needs (least privilege).
[sync], if present, points at the right relay.

File list

Read it. Look for:

outputs/, notes/, private/, research/ — if any of these slipped in, fix [package].exclude and re-pack.
.env, secrets.json, credentials.json, *.pem, *.key — these should be in default excludes already, but verify.
Anything you don't recognise.

Safety warnings

rig inspect prints a section like:

warnings:
  - data/scratch/transcript.json: looks like ~120 email addresses
  - examples/output.md: contains a likely private key block

These come from the safety checks. Each one is heuristic — review and decide. If a warning is a false positive, you can ship; if it's real, fix it before publishing.

Test installs

The round-trip:

rig hub use ./dist/foo-0.1.0.rig.tgz --dir /tmp/test-foo
cd /tmp/test-foo
rig install --interactive
rig doctor

If rig doctor comes up green and you can claude and have a productive session, the rig is ready to publish.

Diff against the previous version

If you have the previous artifact, compare manifests:

rig inspect ./dist/foo-0.1.0.rig.tgz --json | jq '.manifest' > prev.json
rig inspect ./dist/foo-0.2.0.rig.tgz --json | jq '.manifest' > new.json
diff prev.json new.json

This catches accidentally-removed env vars, dropped MCP servers, broken permissions, version bumps that shouldn't have happened.