Develop Reference

How to make my python 3 desktop application portable?

I have tried portable python but the latest version is 3.2.5. (need 3.6+)
I cannot install libraries on it, even the get-pip.py doesn't work.
I'm trying to figure out how to make my project portable on windows systems that do not have python installed.
Also I want the minimum possible libraries(core python modules) to keep the project as lean as possible,

I would go with cx_Freeze - multiplatform module for freezing your Python script in a way that allows you to open it on other Windows machines even if they do not have Python installed. It got very nice and clear documentation also: http://cx-freeze.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ and works a bit better on Windows machines then alternative PyInstaller from my experience (which has interesting option of one-file-package, but in many cases leads to security warnings due to some dirty hacks used to obtain that feature).
However, it may not be enough if you are using some specific modules in your app, as for example matplotlib, dash, etc modules are very hard to pack correctly with Freezer.

I have found a solution to my own question after a couple of days.
I did not want to create an executable for my project but I wanted a portable python folder so that I can add libraries to it as and when I need.
The recent version of portable python is WinPython.
I had to delete some unnecessary files out of it though.
It's size is about 77 mb after extracting
https://winpython.github.io/
https://sourceforge.net/projects/winpython/files/WinPython_3.6/3.6.5.0/WinPython64-3.6.5.0Zero.exe/download

Automate multiple installers

I have written a small python script that i want to share with other users.(i want to keep it as a script rather than and exe so that users can edit the codes if they need to)
my script has several external libraries for python which doesn't come with basic python.
But the other users doesn't have python and the required libraries installed in their PCs .
So,For convenient, I am wondering if there's any way to automate the installation process for installing python and the external libraries they need.
To make things more clear, what i meant is to combine all the installers into 1 single big installer.
For you information, all the installers are window x86 MSI installers and there are about 5 or 6 of them.
Is this possible?Could there be any drawbacks of doing this?
EDIT:
All the users are using windows XP pro 32 bit
python 2.7

I would suggest using NSIS. You can bundle all the MSI installers (including python) into one executable, and install them in "silent mode" in whatever order you want. NSIS also has a great script generator you can download.
Also, you might be interested in activepython. It comes with pip and automatically adds everything to your path so you can just pip install most of your dependencies from a batch script.

what i meant is to combine all the installers into 1 single big installer.
I am not sure, if you mean to make one msi out of several. If you have built the msis, this is possible to work out, but in most situations there were reasons for the separation.
But for now I assume as the others, that you want a setup which combines all msi setups into one, e.g. with a packing/selfextracting part, but probably with some own logic.
This is a very common setup pattern, some call it "bootstrapper". Unfortunately the maturity of most tools for bootstrapping is by far not comparable to the msi creation tools so most companies I know, write kind of an own bootstrapper with the dialogs and the control logic they want. This can be a very expensive job.
If you have not high requirements, it may sound a simple job. Just starting a number of processes after each other. But what about a seamless process bar, what about uninstallation (single or bundled), what about repair, modify, what about, if one of them fails or needs a reboot also concerning repair/uninstall/modify/update. And so on.
As mentioned, one of the first issues of bundling several setups into one is about caring how many and which uninstall entries shall the user see, and if it is ok that your bootstrapper does not create an own, combining one.
If this is not an issue for you, then you have chances to find an easy solution.
I know at least three tools for bootstrappers, some call it suites or bundles. I can only mention them here:
WiX has at least something called "Burn". Google for WiX Burn and you will find it. I haven't used it yet, so I can't tell about.
InstallShield Premier, which is not really what most people call a cheap product, allows setup "Suites" which is the same. I don't want to comment the quality here.
In the Windows SDK there is (has been?) a kind of template of a setup.exe to show how to start installation of msi out of a program. I have never looked into that example really to tell more about it.

I suggest putting all the files into a .sfx.exe archive and get them to run it. Extract all files to %temp% and run a batch script to install python.msi and copy the libraries from %temp% to the python library directory. If you want to install python 2.7.5, grab an "Ninite" installer from http://ninite.com/

Recommendations for Python development on a Mac?

I bought a low-end MacBook about a month ago and am finally getting around to configuring it for Python. I've done most of my Python work in Windows up until now, and am finding the choices for OS X a little daunting. It looks like there are at least five options to use for Python development:
"Stock" Apple Python
MacPython
Fink
MacPorts
roll-your-own-from-source
I'm still primarily developing for 2.5, so the stock Python is fine from a functionality standpoint. What I want to know is: why should I choose one over the other?
Update:
To clarify, I am looking for a discussion of the various options, not links to the documentation. I've marked this as a Community Wiki question, as I don't feel there is a "correct" answer. Thanks to everyone who has already commented for their insight.

One advantage I see in using the "stock" Python that's included with Mac OS X is that it makes deployment to other Macs a piece of cake. I don't know what your deployment scenario is, but for me this is important. My code has to run on any number of Macs at work, and I try to minimize the amount of work it takes to run my code on all of those systems.

I would highly recommend using MacPorts with Porticus for managing your Python installation. It takes a while to build everything, but the advantage is that whatever you build yourself will be built against the same libraries, so you won't have to futz around with statically linked shared objects, etc. if you want your Python stuff to work with Apache, PostgreSQL, etc.
If you choose to go this way, remember to install the python_select port and use it to make your system use the Python installed from MacPorts.
As an added bonus, MacPorts has packages for most main-stream Python eggs, so if you should be able to have MacPorts keep you up-to-date with the latest versions of all that stuff :)

Here's some helpful info to get you started. http://www.python.org/download/mac/

Depends what you are using python for. If you are using MacOS funitionality and things like PyObjC you are probably best of with MacPython or the python provided by Apple.
I use Python on my Mac mostly for development of server side applications which later will run on FreeBSD & Linux boxes. For that I have used fink python for a few years and ever since MacPorts python. With mac ports it is simple to add required c modules (like database driver etc). It's also easy to keep two python Versions (2.5 & 2.6 in my case) around.
I used "compile your own" python to test pre-3.0 python but generally I find managing dependencies to c modules painfull if done by hand.
Thanks to easy_install installing pure python modules is fast and easy for all the options mentioned above.
I was never very much an IDE person. For development I use command line subversion installed by MacPorts, Textmate and occasionaly Expandrive do directly access files on servers. I personally are very dependent on Bicyclerepairman for Textmade to handle my refactoring needs.
Others seem to be very happy with Eclipse & Pydev.

How about EPD from Enthought? Yes, it's large but it is a framework build and includes things like wxPython, vtk, numpy, scipy, and ipython built-in.

I recommend using Python Virtual environments, especially if you use a Timecapsule because Timecapsule will back everything up, except modules you added to Python!

Based on the number of bugs and omissions people have been encountering in Leopard python (just here on SO!), I couldn't recommend that version. e.g., see:
Why do I get wrong results for hmac in Python but not Perl?
Problems on select module on Python 2.5
I would choose MacPorts.
It does not eliminate your existing python supplied by Apple since it installs by default in /opt/local/bin (plays nice with it) and plus it is easy to download and install additional python modules (even binary modules that you need to compile!). I use Porticus GUI to maintain my MacPorts installed list of packages, including python.

In my windows environment I use Eclipse and PyDev, which works quite well together, even if it's a bit sparse. Apparently the exact same environment is available for the Mac as well, so I suggest downloading Eclipse and using the internal update software function to update PyDev with the URL http://pydev.sourceforge.net/updates/. To look further into PyDev, look here.

Apple's supplied python is quite old – my tiger install has 2.3.5. This may not be a problem for you, but you would be missing out on a lot. Also, there is a risk that Apple will update it. I'm not sure if moving from 2.3.5 to (say) 2.4 would cause code to break, but I guess it's possible. This happened to perl people recently: http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/02/18/1435227
Macpython is a framework build (as is Apple's, I believe). To be honest, I'm not sure exactly what that means, but it's a prerequisite for some modules, in particular wxPython. If you get python from macports or fink, you will not be able to run wxPython (unless you run it through X11).

And guess what was forgotten by every answer here ... ActivePython.
No compilation required, even for third-party modules such as numpy, lxml, pyqt and thousands of others.

I recommend python (any python?) plus the ipython shell. My most recent experience with MacPython was MacPython 2.5, and I found IDLE frustrating to use as an editor. It's not very featureful, and its' very slow to scroll large quantities of output.

Miminal Linux For a Pylons Web App?

I am going to be building a Pylons-based web application. For this purpose, I'd like to build a minimal Linux platform, upon which I would then install the necessary packages such as Python and Pylons, and other necessary dependencies. The other reason to keep it minimal is because this machine will be virtual, probably over KVM, and will eventually be replicated in some cloud environment.
What would you use to do this? I am thinking of using Fedora 10's AOS iso, but would love to understand all my options.

I really like JeOS "Just enough OS" which is a minimal distribution of the Ubuntu Server Edition.

If you want to be able to remove all the cruft but still be using a ‘mainstream’ distro rather than one cut down to aim at tiny devices, look at Slackware. You can happily remove stuff as low-level as sysvinit, cron and so on, without collapsing into dependency hell. And nothing in it relies on Perl or Python, so you can easily remove them (and install whichever version of Python your app prefers to use).

For this purpose, I'd like to build a minimal Linux platform...
So Why not try to use ArchLinux www.archlinux.org?
Also you can use virtualenv with Pylons in it.

debootstrap is your friend.

Damn Small Linux? Slax?

If you want to go serious about the virtual appliance idea, take a look at the newly released VMware Studio. It was built exactly for trimming down a system (only Linux for now afaik) so it provides only enough base to run your application.
VMware is going (a bit more) open by pushing an open virtual appliance format (OVF) so, at some point in the future, you might be able to run the result on other virtualization platforms too.

Debootstrap, or use kickstart to strap your FC domains. However, other methods of strapping an RPM based distro exist, such as Steve Kemp's rinse utility that replaces rpmstrap.
Or, you could just grab something at jailtime to use as a base.
If that fails, download everything you need from source, build / install it with a /mydist prefix (including libc, etc) and test it via chroot.
I've been building templates for Xen for years .. its actually turned into a very fun hobby :)

Are there any other good alternatives to zc.buildout and/or virtualenv for installing non-python dependencies?

I am a member of a team that is about to launch a beta of a python (Django specifically) based web site and accompanying suite of backend tools. The team itself has doubled in size from 2 to 4 over the past few weeks and we expect continued growth for the next couple of months at least. One issue that has started to plague us is getting everyone up to speed in terms of getting their development environment configured and having all the right eggs installed, etc.
I'm looking for ways to simplify this process and make it less error prone. Both zc.buildout and virtualenv look like they would be good tools for addressing this problem but both seem to concentrate primarily on the python-specific issues. We have a couple of small subprojects in other languages (Java and Ruby specifically) as well as numerous python extensions that have to be compiled natively (lxml, MySQL drivers, etc). In fact, one of the biggest thorns in our side has been getting some of these extensions compiled against appropriate versions of the shared libraries so as to avoid segfaults, malloc errors and all sorts of similar issues. It doesn't help that out of 4 people we have 4 different development environments -- 1 leopard on ppc, 1 leopard on intel, 1 ubuntu and 1 windows.
Ultimately what would be ideal would be something that works roughly like this, from the dos/unix prompt:
$ git clone [repository url]
...
$ python setup-env.py
...
that then does what zc.buildout/virtualenv does (copy/symlink the python interpreter, provide a clean space to install eggs) then installs all required eggs, including installing any native shared library dependencies, installs the ruby project, the java project, etc.
Obviously this would be useful for both getting development environments up as well as deploying on staging/production servers.
Ideally I would like for the tool that accomplishes this to be written in/extensible via python, since that is (and always will be) the lingua franca of our team, but I am open to solutions in other languages.
So, my question then is: does anyone have any suggestions for better alternatives or any experiences they can share using one of these solutions to handle larger/broader install bases?

Setuptools may be capable of more of what you're looking for than you realize -- if you need a custom version of lxml to work correctly on MacOS X, for instance, you can put a URL to an appropriate egg inside your setup.py and have setuptools download and install that inside your developers' environments as necessary; it also can be told to download and install a specific version of a dependency from revision control.
That said, I'd lean towards using a scriptably generated virtual environment. It's pretty straightforward to build a kickstart file which installs whichever packages you depend on and then boot virtual machines (or production hardware!) against it, with puppet or similar software doing other administration (adding users, setting up services [where's your database come from?], etc). This comes in particularly handy when your production environment includes multiple machines -- just script the generation of multiple VMs within their handy little sandboxed subnet (I use libvirt+kvm for this; while kvm isn't available on all the platforms you have developers working on, qemu certainly is, or you can do as I do and have a small number of beefy VM hosts shared by multiple developers).
This gets you out of the headaches of supporting N platforms -- you only have a single virtual platform to support -- and means that your deployment process, as defined by the kickstart file and puppet code used for setup, is source-controlled and run through your QA and review processes just like everything else.

I always create a develop.py file at the top level of the project, and have also a packages directory with all of the .tar.gz files from PyPI that I want to install, and also included an unpacked copy of virtualenv that is ready to run right from that file. All of this goes into version control. Every developer can simply check out the trunk, run develop.py, and a few moments later will have a virtual environment ready to use that includes all of our dependencies at exactly the versions the other developers are using. And it works even if PyPI is down, which is very helpful at this point in that service's history.

Basically, you're looking for a cross-platform software/package installer (on the lines of apt-get/yum/etc.) I'm not sure something like that exists?
An alternative might be specifying the list of packages that need to be installed via the OS-specific package management system such as Fink or DarwinPorts for Mac OS X and having a script that sets up the build environment for the in-house code?

I have continued to research this issue since I posted the question. It looks like there are some attempts to address some of the needs I outlined, e.g. Minitage and Puppet which take different approaches but both may accomplish what I want -- although Minitage does not explicitly state that it supports Windows. Lacking any better options I will try to make either one of these or just extensive customized use of zc.buildout work for our needs, but I still feel like there must be better options out there.

You might consider creating virtual machine appliances with whatever production OS you are running, and all of the software dependencies pre-built. Code can be edited either remotely, or with a shared folder. It worked pretty well for me in a past life that had a fairly complicated development environment.

Puppet doesn't (easily) support the Win32 world either. If you're looking for a deployment mechanism and not just a "dev setup" tool, you might consider looking into ControlTier (http://open.controltier.com/) which has a open-source cross-platform solution.
Beyond that you're looking at "enterprise" software such as BladeLogic or OpsWare and typically an outrageous pricetag for the functionality offered (my opinion, obviously).
A lot of folks have been aggressively using a combination of Puppet and Capistrano (even non-rails developers) for deployment automation tools to pretty good effect. Downside, again, is that it's expecting a somewhat homogeneous environment.