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py2exe

Py2Exe is an additional command to Distutils, that creates standalone distributions for Win32. Latest version as of 2006-March-20 is 0.6.5

Its home is here Home and on Sourceforge https://sourceforge.net/projects/py2exe/

Releases can be downloaded from https://sourceforge.net/projects/py2exe/files/

How does py2exe work and what are all those files?

Let's start from the needed results going back to how py2exe does its job.

Python is an interpreted language and as long as Microsoft will not ship a Python interpreter (and its accompanying class library) with every copy of its flagship operating systems products, there is no direct way to execute a Python script on a vanilla Microsoft OS machine. For most casual user of py2exe, that means that you must create an executable (.exe) file that when clicked on will just run the script. This is what py2exe does for you. After py2exe has done its magic, you should have a "dist" directory with all the files necessary to run your python script. No install necessary. Click and run. No DLL hell, nothing else to download.

But what are all those files?
myprog.exe The actual executable. You can select a custom icon by using some specific target options (see Icons)
python??.dll the python interpreter library. This is the brain of your executable
library.zip This is a standard zip file where all the pure source modules will be inserted (using the "zipfile" option, you can also select to put that file in a sub-directory and with a different name)
*.pyd The pyd files are actually standard Windows DLL (I used the useful depends.exe to check things around). They are also standard modules for Python. A Python program can import those pyd. Some applications build pyd to provide accelerated features. Also they are necessary to provide support to native functions of the operating system (see also CTypes to never have to use SWIG again!). Those files also follow into the subdirectory where library.zip will be installed
*.dll some pyd probably have some DLL dependencies, and here they come
w9xpopen.exe This is needed on Win9x platform.

To run your program needs all those files as a necessary condition. But it might happen that this is not a sufficient condition. For examples, as encodings are imported "by name". If you use a feature that requires encodings, you will need to put an option to include encodings unconditionally or to import it explicitly from one of your script. (see Missing encodings and Default encoding). Some other modules (eg pyserial-pyparallel) also conditionally import modules for each platform. You can avoid the warning by putting the correct "ignores" options in py2exe. Last but not least, modules like pygtk seem to create a module reference on-the-fly and therefore the corresponding warnings also are harmless (see Excluding DLLs to learn how to correct that).

An important point to note: the main script (the one passed as an option to "windows" or "console" in your setup file) is not put with all the other files in the library.zip. Instead it is byte-compiled (see Optimized bytecode for some details on optimization) and inserted into a named resource in the executable shell. This technique also allows you to insert binary string in the final executable (very nice if you want to add a custom version tag) through the usage of the "other_resources" options for the target (see Embedded resources).

Learned things with py2exe 0.5

py2exe0.5.0 is the release of py2exe 0.5 announced by Thomas Heller in January 2004

As nearly usual in Open Source space, prereleases and beta are of the same quality as .02 releases from some commercial software developing companies - rather full functional, with small obstacles.

I had to "upgrade" also my knowledge about workarounds from py2exe 0.4

Windows services - some gained knowledge

Tips and Tricks

General

py2exe and PyQt

  • PyQt If you're getting File "qt.pyc", line 7, in __load Import Error: No module named sip, read this

py2exe and wxPython

  • wxPython If you're getting wxObjectPtr not found, read this

py2exe and PyGTK

  • PyGTK A recipe for py2exe and PyGTK

py2exe and PIL

  • PIL If you're getting cannot identify image file, read this

py2exe and reportlab

py2exe and Python ADODB modules

  • ADODB package Modules named adodb_xxx (like adodb_mysql) are not added automatically, must be added explicitly

py2exe and PyXML

  • PyXML If you're getting File "xml\sax\saxexts.pyc", line 77, in make_parser; xml.sax._exceptions.SAXReaderNotAvailable: No parsers found, read this.

py2exe and win32com

py2exe and ctypes.com

py2exe and Innosetup

py2exe and Biopython

  • Biopython Fixing problems with importing Bio.Config files from library.zip

py2exe and SciPy

  • SciPy Using py2exe with scipy ends up with missing cephes and __cvs_version__ messages. Here is a fix.

py2exe and PythonCard

  • PythonCard Getting pythoncard to work by editing setup.py

py2exe and Quixote

Quixote is a pythonivc toolkit for web pages which allows one to execute ptl files using ihooks. You can distribute your web application with medusa or twisted and hence you can create a web application without IIS or Apache.

I like to distribute my application with py2exe but I can not make py2exe setup script to recognize that x.ptl is a valid python files. Any idea how to do this? - impossible: Quixote HAM20040602

py2exe and Matplotlib

  • Matplotlib - Fixing and including configuration information for this plotting package.

py2exe and Tix

  • Tix - Including the Tix DLL and Tcl files to make Tix apps work.

the runtime enviroment

  • Environment - Information about the environment for the executable

py2exe and subprocess

  • Subprocess - Getting subprocess module to work with py2exe.

py2exe and logging module

  • Logging - Getting the %(filename)s format string working in the python logging module.

py2exe and win32pipe

py2exe and Python Eggs

  • Python eggs - A recipe for creating an .exe out of eggs

py2exe and NumPy

  • If you're getting No scipy-style subpackage 'xxx' found in c:\...\library.zip\numpy. Ignoring, try --skip-archive option.

Fixes

Thoughts

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