Freezing Your Code

    Applications such as ‘Dropbox’, ‘Eve Online’, ‘Civilization IV’, andBitTorrent clients do this.

    The advantage of distributing this way is that your application will “just work”,even if the user doesn’t already have the required version of Python (or any)installed. On Windows, and even on many Linux distributions and OS X, the rightversion of Python will not already be installed.

    Besides, end-user software should always be in an executable format. Filesending in are for software engineers and system administrators.

    One disadvantage of freezing is that it will increase the size of yourdistribution by about 2–12 MB. Also, you will be responsible for shippingupdated versions of your application when security vulnerabilities toPython are patched.

    Packaging your code is for distributinglibraries or tools to other developers.

    On Linux, an alternative to freezing is to(e.g. .deb files for Debian or Ubuntu, or .rpm files for Red Hat and SuSE.)

    Todo

    Fill in “Freezing Your Code” stub

    Note

    Freezing Python code on Linux into a Windows executable was only oncesupported in PyInstaller and later dropped.

    Note

    All solutions need a Microsoft Visual C++ to be installed on the target machine, except py2app.Only PyInstaller makes a self-executable exe that bundles the appropriate DLL whenpassing —onefile to Configure.py.

    Prerequisite is to install .

    • Install bbfreeze:
    • Write most basic bb_setup.py
    1. from bbfreeze import Freezer
    2. freezer = Freezer(distdir='dist')
    3. freezer.addScript('foobar.py', gui_only=True)
    4. freezer()

    Note

    This will work for the most basic one file scripts. For more advanced freezing you will have to provideinclude and exclude paths like so:

    1. freezer = Freezer(distdir='dist', includes=['my_code'], excludes=['docs'])
    • (Optionally) include icon
    1. Provide the Microsoft Visual C++ runtime DLL for the freezer. It might be possible to append your sys.pathwith the Microsoft Visual Studio path but I find it easier to drop msvcp90.dll in the same folder where your scriptresides.
    • Freeze!
    1. $ python bb_setup.py

    py2exe

    Prerequisite is to install . The last release of py2exe is from the year 2014. There is not active development.

    1. from distutils.core import setup
    2. import py2exe
    3.  
    4. setup(
    5.     windows=[{'script': 'foobar.py'}],
    • (Optionally) include icon
    • (Optionally)
    • Generate .exe into dist directory:

    py2app

    PyInstaller can be used to build Unix executables and windowed apps on Mac OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard) or newer.

    To install PyInstaller, use pip:

    1. $ pip install pyinstaller

    To create a standard Unix executable, from say , use:

    1. $ pyinstaller script.py

    This creates:

    • a script.spec file, analogous to a make file
    • a build folder, that holds some log files
    • a dist folder, that holds the main executable script, and some dependent Python libraries
      all in the same folder as script.py. PyInstaller puts all the Python libraries used in script.py into the dist folder, so when distributing the executable, distribute the whole dist folder.

    The file can be edited to , with options such as:

    • bundling data files with the executable
    • including run-time libraries (.dll or .so files) that PyInstaller can’t infer automatically
    • adding Python run-time options to the executable
      Now script.spec can be run with pyinstaller (instead of using script.py again):

    To create a standalone windowed OS X application, use the —windowed option:

    1. $ pyinstaller --windowed script.spec

    This creates a script.app in the dist folder. Make sure to use GUI packages in your Python code, like PyQt or , to control the graphical parts of the app.

    There are several options in script.spec related to Mac OS X app bundles here. For example, to specify an icon for the app, use the option.

    bbFreeze