I'm not sure if I'm even asking this question correctly. I just built my first real program and I want to make it available to people in my office. I'm not sure if I will have access to the shared server, but I was hoping I could simply package the program (I hope I'm using this term correctly) and upload it to a website for my coworkers to download.
I know how to zip a file, but something tells me it's a little more complicated than that :) In fact, some of the people in my office who need the program installed do not have python on their computers already, and I would rather avoid asking everyone to install python before downloading my .py files from my hosting server.
So, is there an easy way to package my program, along with python and the other dependencies, for simple distribution from a website? I tried searching for the answer but I can't find exactly what I'm looking for. Oh, and since this is the first time I have done this- are there any precautions I need to take when sharing these files so that everything runs smoothly?
PyInstaller or py2exe can package your Python program.
Both are actively maintained. PyInstaller is actively maintained. py2exe has not been updated for at least a year. I've used each with success.
Also there is cx_Freeze which I have not used.
Take a look at http://www.py2exe.org/
Related
I have written my python program with a Gui. Now i wanna use this tool in my company.
for this I need an .exe so others can use it.
I know my code. But now i have to compile my code to an .exe file with a third party tool like pyinstaller or pyuic.
How can I be sure this open source tools are safe to use in my company without risking any hackers infiltrated this tools?
Is there any official way or tool to make a usable windows program from a py file?
The "official way" to load PyInstaller is done via the pip command.
Open source does not mean everybody can edit the code that ist officialy distributed. If you would edit a copy of a printed law in your house does not mean that the law changes for everyone. Official commits are reviewed and checked against malicious edits.
Did you ever question other Python packages you loaded into your machine? They are distributed the same way.
Malicious actors will sometimes make clones of packages and publish them with a similar name in order to get lucky when people makea typo in the pip command. This is something you should always check.
Recently I've been developing Python code as a freelancer. I've mostly worked on social media bots, my usual way of delivering the code is as a Python script for people to run on their compilers. However, I've started to run into people that lack the technical knowledge of installing modules and running the code that way. How do I create a package like software and deliver it in a way that can be ready-to-run and users don't have to download anything extra? Thank you in advance for your feedback.
Check out py2exe. It is a wrapper that converts your script into an executable, so the user can run it without needing to install any python libraries.
Alternatives to py2exe are:
PyInstaller - the advantage of using this is that it lets you build executables in formats other than exe, if you want to make your program run on non-Windows platforms, for example.
cx_Freeze - this is also another cross-platform alternative.
One method would be (as stated in the previous answer) is to use exe converters, but that wouldn't be as effective if you target Mac and Linux users as well.
My solution is going to take you a little more time, but it will be worth it. Here goes:
Please learn Angular JS, or some other framework (I prefer Angular). Once you know that, you can easily develop a web app for your project, and add your Python to that.
The good news is, there are lots of tutorials for this, such as https://codehandbook.org/creating-a-web-app-using-angularjs-python-mongodb/ (also teaches you mongodb) Anyways, you can find other tutorials on your own.
You could of course, I guess, build it into a mobile app, but I think web app would be easier.
I've spent countless hours trying to understand this and unfortunately I haven't gotten to an answer yet. Or at least I don't think I have.
First up I should say that I am a Java Developer. I've only recently started working with Python and the build-process is a bit...odd for me.
In my mind I write an application, I compile it to run and I package it into a .jar for other people to use. Either as a library or for end-users to execute and have fun with it. (ignoring stuff like maven or gradle...)
I wrote a little CLT in python that consists of ~6 files and I wanted to distribute it. From what I could find I was supposed to write a setup.py and I found some guides on how to do that but ... to be honest I'm not even sure what that did. I could get my source code bundled into a tar.gz with some other meta data or it would create some weird files that I don't know what to do with.
Then I found PyInstaller and it worked great to package everything into a binary. However I've run into some problems trying to create a Debian package and it has made me re-assess and question the fact that there doesn't seem to be something in Python (without having to use an external tool) that lets me package/ bundle/ whatever my application into a single file to be run.
And that's something I can't get my head around. I mean...before there were tools like PyInstaller and P2Exe and what not, how did people distribute their applications? Am I expected to write a C application, somehow include the python code in there and compile that? Sorry if this seems like a stupid question but I'm really asking. I've googled around so much and spent so much time on it and haven't found a satisfactory answer so I hope someone here can help me with this! Thanks.
If you package your Python code for pip, you can include some executable scripts that start your program. I don't know how the situation was 5 years ago when this question got asked, but nowadays pip is pretty much integrated with Python, to the point that there's a standard library module to bootstrap pip in case it's missing:
https://docs.python.org/3/library/ensurepip.html
The situation is different if you want to package an application for some other package manager, like Anaconda or the package managers of various Linux distributions, or as a Windows installer. Obviously, you'll have to create a separate package for each package manager or installation technique you want to support.
New to Python, so excuse my lack of specific technical jargon. Pretty simple question really, but I can't seem to grasp or understand the concept.
It seems that a lot of modules require using pip or easy_install and running setup.py to "install" into your python installation or your virtualenv. What is the difference between installing a module and simply taking it and importing the into another script? It seems that you access the modules the same way.
Thanks!
It's like the difference between:
Uploading a photo to the internet
Linking the photo URL inside an HTML page
Installing puts the code somewhere python expects those kinds of things to be, and the import statement says "go look there for something named X now, and make the data available to me for use".
For a single module, it usually doesn't make any difference. For complicated webs of modules, though, an installation program may do many things that wouldn't be immediately obvious. For example, it may also copy data files into locations the new modules can find them, put executables (binary libraries, or DLLs on Windws, for example) where the new modules can find them, do different things depending on which version of Python you have, and so on.
If deploying a web of modules were always easy, nobody would have written setup programs to begin with ;-)
I have a Windows program that I made with python and py2exe. I'd like to create an updating feature so that the software can be readily updated.
What are common ways of going about this?
If you think your code might benefit others, you could put it up on PyPI. Then having different versions is just updating your package, or telling your clients to use easy_install to get the latest version. This doesn't push updates, though.
You can try Esky, which is an auto-update framework for managing different versions, including fetching new versions and rolling back partial updates. It can be found on PyPI.
That said, I haven't used Esky. If you wish to roll your own auto-update feature, you might want to look at Boxed Dice to see how they got around to it.
When you package an app with py2exe, the result is usually a single executable (perhaps with some data files). This is simplest to update by just proposing the user to download and install a new version every once in a while (how you check with a server that such new version exists is a different question).
If you want to reduce the download size the user has to do, application commonly resort to breaking themselves up into multiple DLLs and updating only the relevant DLLs. When you have a Python application you don't have DLLs but you have an even easier option - you can just keep most of your app's logic outside the exe in .pyc files, and update just some of these .pyc files.
Now, mind you, .pyc files are easily "decompilable" into Python (a somewhat obfuscated version of your original code), but having an exe made with py2exe isn't much safer, because py2exe is open-source software and packs all the same files inside the exe anyway.
To conclude, my suggestion is don't bother. How large can your application be? With today's fast connections, it's easier to just make the user download a whole new version than to invest a lot of time into building partial-update functionality into your program.