Building executables for Python 3 and PyQt

Question

I built a rather simple application in Python 3.1 using PyQt4. Being done, I want the application to be distributed to computers without either of those installed.

I almost exclusively care about Windows platforms, so my goal is to have a single executable file and maybe some resource files and .dlls in the end.

Having searched around, I came to the conclusion that

• py2exe only supports Python up to version 2.7
• pyinstaller only supports Python up to version 2.6
• cx_Freeze does not work for me because I keep on getting the following error when trying to execute my successfully build binary:

Y:\Users\lulz\build\exe.win32-3.1>system_shutdown.exe

Traceback (most recent call last):

    File "Y:\Program Files (x86)\Python\lib\site-packages\cx_Freeze\initscripts\Console3.py", line 27, in  exec(code, m.__dict__)

    File "Y:/Users/lulz/Documents/Coding/Python3/projects/System Shutdown/system_shutdown.pyw", line 5, in  from PyQt4 import QtCore

    File "ExtensionLoader_PyQt4_QtCore.py", line 16, in  AttributeError: 'NoneType' object has no attribute 'modules'

So my problem is basically two problems here:

1. Is there another way but cx_Freeze to build binaries with my configuration?
2. If not, what might the cx_Freeze problem be?

I can provide more information on the second problem if necessary, like my call of cx_Freeze, my distutils setup script etc.

Thank you already for your help and comments.

Answer 1

You can fix this by appending one line of code to freeze.py in your cx_Freeze package.

It is described here: http://www.mail-archive.com/cx-freeze-users@lists.sourceforge.net/msg00212.html

It worked for me at least :)

Cheers, Almar

Answer 2

For Python 3.3 and later, there's a good resolution here: py2exe - generate single executable file

Install py2exe:

pip install py2exe

Then add besides 'your_script.py' file, the following 'Make_exe.py' file:

from distutils.core import setup
import py2exe, sys

class Make_exe():
    def __init__(self, python_script):
        sys.argv.append('py2exe')

        setup(
            console=[{'script': python_script}],
            zipfile = None,
            options={
                'py2exe': 
                {
                    'bundle_files': 1, 
                    'compressed': True,
                    # Add includes if necessary, e.g. 
                    'includes': ['lxml.etree', 'lxml._elementpath', 'gzip'],
                }
            }
        )

if __name__ == '__main__':
    Make_exe('your_script.py')

And if you want to make 'your_script.py' rebuild itself as 'your_script.exe' each time you run it in python, you can add to its main:

import subprocess
import sys

if __name__ == '__main__':
    currentFile = sys.argv[0]
    if currentFile.lower().endswith(".py"):
        exitCode = subprocess.call("python Make_exe.py")
        if exitCode==0 :
            dirName = os.path.dirname(currentFile)
            exeName = os.path.splitext(os.path.basename(currentFile))[0] + '.exe'
            exePath = dirName + "/dist/" + exeName
            cmd = [exePath] + sys.argv[1:]
            print ("Executing command:\n %s" % cmd)
            exitCode = subprocess.call(cmd)
        sys.exit(exitCode)
    else:
        print ("This will be executed only within the new generated EXE File...")