Freezing Your Code

An alternative to shipping your code is freezing it — shipping it as an executable with a bundled Python interpreter.

Many applications you use every day do this:

  • Dropbox
  • BitTorrent
  • ...

Todo

Fill in “Freezing Your Code” stub

Comparison

Solutions and platforms/features supported:

Solution Windows Linux OS X Python 3 License One-file mode Zipfile import Eggs pkg_resources support
bbFreeze yes yes yes no MIT no yes yes yes
py2exe yes no no yes MIT yes yes no no
pyInstaller yes yes yes no GPL yes no yes no
cx_Freeze yes yes yes yes PSF no yes yes no
py2app no no yes yes MIT no yes yes yes

Note

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

Note

All solutions need MS Visual C++ dll to be installed on target machine, except py2app. Only Pyinstaller makes self-executable exe that bundles the dll when passing --onefile to Configure.py.

Windows

bbFreeze

Prerequisite is to install Python, Setuptools and pywin32 dependency on Windows.

Todo

Write steps for most basic .exe

py2exe

Prerequisite is to install Python on Windows.

  1. Download and install http://sourceforge.net/projects/py2exe/files/py2exe/
  2. Write setup.py (List of configuration options):
from distutils.core import setup
import py2exe

setup(
    windows=[{'script': 'foobar.py'}],
)
  1. (Optionally) include icon
  2. (Optionally) one-file mode
  3. Generate .exe into dist directory:
$ python setup.py py2exe
  1. Provide the Microsoft Visual C runtime DLL. Two options: globally install dll on target machine or distribute dll alongside with .exe.

OS X

py2app

PyInstaller

Linux

bbFreeze

PyInstaller