What does a “version file” look like?

Question

I\'ve been googling this for ages now without results. The PyInstaller manual says:

--version-file=FILE
    add a version resource from FILE to the exe

Answer 1

I might be missing this in the previous answers, or maybe PyInstaller has been updated since these answers were originally provided, but the current docs for PyInstaller teach a fairly simple method for this using a command-line tool provided with PyInstaller (though I missed this section the first few times I looked to the docs).

Point this tool at an .exe file on your system that has "good looking" version info, and it will create a human-readable, commented, editable version resource file that you can use as a starting point.

pyi-grab_version executable_with_version_resource

which by default writes a file file_version_info.txt to the working directory.

Running the above on my local copy of svn.exe produces:

# UTF-8
#
# For more details about fixed file info 'ffi' see:
# http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms646997.aspx
VSVersionInfo(
  ffi=FixedFileInfo(
# filevers and prodvers should be always a tuple with four items: (1, 2, 3, 4)
# Set not needed items to zero 0.
filevers=(1, 9, 7, 30920),
prodvers=(1, 9, 7, 30920),
# Contains a bitmask that specifies the valid bits 'flags'r
mask=0x3f,
# Contains a bitmask that specifies the Boolean attributes of the file.
flags=0x0,
# The operating system for which this file was designed.
# 0x4 - NT and there is no need to change it.
OS=0x4,
# The general type of file.
# 0x1 - the file is an application.
fileType=0x1,
# The function of the file.
# 0x0 - the function is not defined for this fileType
subtype=0x0,
# Creation date and time stamp.
date=(0, 0)
),
  kids=[
StringFileInfo(
  [
  StringTable(
    u'040904B0',
    [StringStruct(u'CompanyName', u'Apache Software Foundation'),
    StringStruct(u'FileDescription', u'svn'),
    StringStruct(u'FileVersion', u'1.9.7'),
    StringStruct(u'InternalName', u'SVN'),
    StringStruct(u'LegalCopyright', u'Copyright (c) The Apache Software Foundation'),
    StringStruct(u'OriginalFilename', u'svn.exe'),
    StringStruct(u'ProductName', u'Subversion'),
    StringStruct(u'ProductVersion', u'1.9.7 (r1800392)')])
  ]), 
VarFileInfo([VarStruct(u'Translation', [1033, 1200])])
  ]
)

edit this to your purpose, and feed it back to PyInstaller as a --version-file, e.g.

pyinstaller [options] myscript.py --version-file file_version_info.txt