cx-freeze fails to include modules even when included specifically

Question

I am trying to use cx-freeze to create a static self-contained distribution of my app (The Spye Python Engine, www.spye.dk), however, when I run cx-freeze, it says:

Missing modules:
? _md5 imported from hashlib
? _scproxy imported from urllib
? _sha imported from hashlib
? _sha256 imported from hashlib
? _sha512 imported from hashlib
? _subprocess imported from subprocess
? configparser imported from apport.fileutils
? usercustomize imported from site

This is my setup.py:

#!/usr/bin/env python
from cx_Freeze import setup, Executable

includes = ["hashlib", "urllib", "subprocess", "fileutils", "site"]
includes += ["BaseHTTPServer", "cgi", "cgitb", "fcntl", "getopt", "httplib", "inspect", "json", "math", "operator", "os", "os,", "psycopg2", "re", "smtplib", "socket", "SocketServer", "spye", "spye.config", "spye.config.file", "spye.config.merge", "spye.config.section", "spye.editor", "spye.framework", "spye.frontend", "spye.frontend.cgi", "spye.frontend.http", "spye.input", "spye.output", "spye.output.console", "spye.output.stdout", "spye.pluginsystem", "spye.presentation", "spye.util.html", "spye.util.rpc", "ssl", "stat,", "struct", "subprocess", "sys", "termios", "time", "traceback", "tty", "urllib2", "urlparse", "uuid"]

includefiles=[]
excludes = []
packages = []
target = Executable(
    # what to build
    script = "spye-exe",
    initScript = None,
    #base = 'Win32GUI',
    targetDir = r"dist",
    targetName = "spye.exe",
    compress = True,
    copyDependentFiles = True,
    appendScriptToExe = False,
    appendScriptToLibrary = False,
    icon = None
    )

setup(
    version = "0.1",
    description = "No Description",
    author = "No Author",
    name = "cx_Freeze Sample File",

    options = {"build_exe": {"includes": includes,
                 "excludes": excludes,
                 "packages": packages
                 #"path": path
                 }
           },

    executables = [target]
    )

Please note that I clearly specify the missing modules in the includes list.

How do I fix this?

Answer 1

Missing modules aren't necessarily a problem: a lot of modules try different imports to accommodate different platforms or different versions of Python. In subprocess, for example, you can find this code:

if mswindows:
    ...
    import _subprocess

cx_Freeze doesn't know about this, so it will try to find _subprocess on Linux/Mac as well, and report it as missing. Specifying them in includes doesn't change anything, because it's trying to include them, but unable to find them.

It should build a file anyway, so try running that and seeing if it works.

Answer 2

I guess, you can not simply += on lists.

You should probably use the list method extend - otherwise the original list will not be modified:

includes.extend(["BaseHTTPServer", "<rest of your modules>"])

EDIT: (Thank @ThomasK)

+= works fine - I only had an online Python interpreter that did not work correctly. (I have no python install on my Windows installation so I had to check online).