Is there a way to embed dependencies within a python script?

Question

I have a simple script that has a dependency on dnspython for parsing zone files. I would like to distribute this script as a single .py that users can run just so long as

Answer 1

You can package multiple Python files up into a .egg. Egg files are essentially just zip archives with well defined metadata - look at the setuptools documentation to see how to do this. Per the docs you can make egg files directly executable by specifying the entry point. This would give you a single executable file that can contain your code + any other dependencies.

EDIT: Nowadays I would recommend building a pex to do this. pex is basically an executable zip file with non stdlib dependencies. It doesn't contain a python distribution (like py2app/py2exe) but holds everything else and can be built with a single command line invocation. https://pex.readthedocs.org/en/latest/