I would be willing to use only pygame, but using easygui makes it a lot easier to select levels. I am running ubuntu, but if neccesarry I have access to a windows machine. My main purpose is to make it easier for my non-program savvy friends to play my games. They are all either mac or windows people, so a EASY solution for either or both that can incorporate both of my modules would be greatly appreciated.
You might want to look at these
py2app - http://wiki.python.org/moin/MacPython/py2app
py2exe - http://www.py2exe.org/
Both of these can create standalone executable files for your app. They take care packaging all the dependencies into the binary so you don't have to worry about missing libraries.
Related
I have tried many times to use a compiler like cx_freeze and other programs, but for some reason nothing seems to be working. I made a little game which I want to send to a friend, but he needs python installed.
Can't I just put python.exe and pygame into the folder that I will send my friend and won't python be installed then, and all he needs to do is run the program .py and it will work? Sorry if I'm not being clear.. I'm just trying to find a simple way to compile my code to let users not waste time on downloading pygame and python.
py2exe allows you to package python applications for Windows. Right now it supports everything from 2.4 - 3.1 of python. You do however need to be able to redistribute MSVCR90.dll.
There are a range of distribution tools and you can find a list here.
Since you've had difficultly with several tools now updating your question with error codes and speific problems will yeild better responses.
From my knowledge, just putting a bunch of your stuff in one folder and sending doesn't work. It would be easier to make a .exe
That way your stuff will be protected, and users can easily start it. Otherwise idk. Try using pyinstaller again. It should work if you have a python.x
CX_Freeze is known for having many bugs and problems, Pyg.exe is new to me also. Your best bet is just keep trying until you find a solution.
Putting python.exe and your script together in a folder will not work for distribution. You require all Python dependencies - at best your would need to include all of your Python folder, and it still might not work. The best method would be compilation or packaging with programs such as py2exe, cx_freeze, Cython, pyg.exe, etc.
I have a Python program that uses the following libraries: Tkinter, NumPy, SciPy, SymPy, and Matplotlib. And probably it will include more libraries in the near future while being developed.
How can I distribute such a program to Mac, Windows, and Linux users, without requiring users to install the right version of each library, and hopefully by just downloading a single file and executing it?
What I initially wanted was compiling the program into a static binary program, but it seems that it's not an easy goal.
Probably I can ask users to install Python, but that's the maximum requirement that I can ask for them, and I want to avoid it if possible.
I don't care about hiding the code at all; in the end I will distribute both the code and the program. What I want is to make the program very easy for any user to download and run it.
Even such an advice as 'a Python program is not suitable for such a distribution' is welcome. I had a fair amount of experience with distributing C programs but I don't know what to expect with a Python program.
For convenient, you could try something like pyinstaller.
It will package all of needed module into one folder or or one executable as you like. And it can run in all platforms.
The simple command to make a directory contains an executable file and all needed library is
$pyinstaller --onedir --name=directory_name --distpath="path_to_put_that_directory" "path to your main_program.py"
You can change --onedir into --onefile to make that folder into an one executable file which has all the thing it need to run inside.
You can use Setuptools to do the packaging stuff .
It create eggs, which are the equivalent of jars.
https://pypi.python.org/pypi/setuptools#using-setuptools-and-easyinstall
https://pythonhosted.org/setuptools/setuptools.html
You can have a look at Py2exe , even though you risk the application becoming bigger than it already is, and some packages need to be installed manually .
All of the python I've written so far have been fine on my own computer, but now I'd like to send some programs to friends to have them test certain features. Suppose I wrote an application in python with wxpython. Assuming people I send code to will not have either installed, what is the best way to include both python, and the wxpython library so the other person isn't struggling to get it running? I've never had to do this at this point in my learning and would love some feedback!
Thanks.
You can create a bundle using py2exe and installer using NSIS and ship it as executable so that your friend will get the complete working executable. But mind you, this will increase the size of the file enormously and I have often found it easier to ask them to install via README.txt files.
There are lots of binary builders: py2exe, cx_freeze, bbfreeze, PyInstaller, GUI2Exe. I have a whole slew of articles on these:
http://www.blog.pythonlibrary.org/2010/08/31/another-gui2exe-tutorial-build-a-binary-series/
http://www.blog.pythonlibrary.org/2010/07/31/a-py2exe-tutorial-build-a-binary-series/
http://www.blog.pythonlibrary.org/2010/08/19/a-bbfreeze-tutorial-build-a-binary-series/
http://www.blog.pythonlibrary.org/2010/08/12/a-cx_freeze-tutorial-build-a-binary-series/
http://www.blog.pythonlibrary.org/2010/08/10/a-pyinstaller-tutorial-build-a-binary-series/
Unless they are going to develop with Python too, then I don't see any reason for them to want to install a bunch of multi-megabyte installers versus your own. You can read about how to use Inno Setup to create an installer here:
http://www.blog.pythonlibrary.org/2008/08/27/packaging-wxpymail-for-distribution/
I am currently working on a python program with the use of wxpython to make out a gui application. However, i wish to compile my application to be like a standalone application where people can just get the .exe file and run it without installing python and wxpython. I am not sure if it is possible, thus i hope that someone can give me some guidance on this. Also, if it is possible, please tell me what program should i use to accomplish that.
Thanks
You need to create a frozen binary. You can use py2exe for this purpose.
For what it's worth, if you ever need to make executables on a unix system, you can use Freeze, a utility that comes with Python.
For a nice cross-platform solution, I always recommend pyinstaller (actually, I find it better than py2exe even just for making a Windows-only executable -- it can do code signing, can seamlessly incorporate "big, hairy" libraries such as PyQt, etc;-).
I need to develop a small-medium sized desktop GUI application, preferably with Python as a language of choice because of time constraints.
What GUI library choices do I have which allow me to redistribute my application standalone, assuming that the users don't have a working Python installation and obviously don't have the GUI libraries I'm using either?
Also, how would I go about packaging everything up in binaries of reasonable size for each target OS? (my main targets are Windows and Mac OS X)
Addition:
I've been looking at WxPython, but I've found plenty of horror stories of packaging it with cx_freeze and getting 30mb+ binaries, and no real advice on how to actually do the packaging and how trust-worthy it is.
http://wiki.wxpython.org/CreatingStandaloneExecutables
It shouldn't be that large unless you have managed to include the debug build of wx.
I seem to rememebr about 4Mb for the python.dll and similair for wx.
This may help:
How can I make an EXE file from a Python program?
Python has an embedded GUI toolkit named TKinter which is based on Tk library from TCL programming language. It is very basic and does not have all the functionality you expect in Windows Forms or GTK for example but if you must have platform independent toolkit I see no other choice taking in mind that you also dont want to grow that much the binary.
Tkinter is not hard at all to use since it doesnt have millions of widgets/controls and options and is the default toolkit included in most python distributions, at least on Windows, OSX and Linux.
GTK and QT are prettier and more powerful but they have a one big disadvantage for you: they are heavy and deppend upon third libraries, especially GTK which has a lot of dependencies that makes it a little hard to distribute it embeded in your software.
As for the binary creation I know there is py2exe which converts python code to win32 executable code (.exe's) but im not sure if there is something similar for OSX. Are you worried because people could see the source code or just so you can bundle all in a single package? If you just want to bundle everything you dont need to create a standalone executable, you could easily create an installer:
Creating distributable in python
That's a guide on how to distribute your software when it's done.
http://Gajim.org for Windows uses python and PyGtk. You can check, how they did it. Also, there's PyQt for GUI (and wxpython mentioned earlier).
I don't have any experience building stand-alone apps for any platform other than Windows.
That said:
Tkinter: works fine with py2exe. Python Megawidgets (an "expansion library" for Tkinter) works fine also, but it does funky things with dynamic imports, so you need to combine all the components into a big file "pmw.py" and add it to your project (well, you'll also have pmwblt.py and pmwcolor.py). There are instructions for how to do this somewhere (either on py2exe wiki or in the PMW docs). Tix (an extension to Tk that you can use with Tkinter) doesn't work with py2exe, or at least that was my experience about four years ago.
wxPython also works fine with py2exe. I just checked an app I have; the whole distribution came to around 11MB. Most of that was the wx DLLs and .pyd files, but I can't see how you'd avoid that. If you are targetting Windows XP, you need to include a manifest in your setup.py or else it will look ugly. See this email for details.
I've used py2Exe myself - it's really easy (at least for small apps).
Combination that I am familiar with: wxPython, py2exe, upx
The key to resolving your last concern about the size of the distribution is using upx to compress the DLLs. It looks like they support MacOS executables. You will pay an initial decompression penalty when the DLLs are first loaded.