Deploying Python Qt application cross-platform: Win, OSX, Linux - python

We are designing open source UI controller application for Plone CMS. The application itself would be just simple start/stop dialog window for Plone daemon process, mainly aimed for Windows users.
However we are hoping to use the same app for OSX and Linux.
We can create the code for Python Qt application, but we feel unsure about the deployment process. In the optimal case we'd hope to create static builds (.exe for Windows, .dmg for OSX) all megabyte so Qt included for our tiny Python script, just to maximize the ease for the end user.
Are there any examples, scripts, etc. to build Qt friendly installers cross-platform? What other best practices we should consider?

PyInstaller is a nice one to create executables and it comes with full PyQt support. It says it can create executables for Windows, OsX and Linux but I've never used it for anything other than Windows. For Windows, it was quite painless and easy.

This doesn't address the packaging/deployment component of your question, but might be a useful side note.... If you haven't already, you may want to consider PySide for your Python bindings, instead of PyQt. The licensing terms are more permissive (LGPL) than PyQt, and may be more appropriate unless you're commercially licensed.
FWIW, I have successfully used py2app with PySide/Qt4 on the Mac, but don't know if it goes cross platform.

Related

How to do Relative GUI Development in Python?

I am used to making android applications and I would like to also make desktop applications. I would prefer to use Python. Is there a module that allows relative layout to better fit all monitors? I have tried pyside, but I could only get absolute. I saw the Kivy module as well, but I didn't want to devote a lot of time to it if it isn't what I need. I am developing on a windows platform for windows, but plan to possibly port it to linux and mac as well. I also would prefer to use Python 3.
I would personally recommend Tkinter. It works on Windows, Linux, and Mac, and is simple enough such that you can pick it up in a weekend. There is plenty of support and documentation as well.
Consider wxPython as well--it would satisfy your needs.

Best way to build a cross-platform and custom-skinned application with Python

Features needed:
A framework, allowing me to build tab-based application with custom design (like in Hotot twitter client), keeping the native os window frame.
Compatible with Python.
My application will be running under Win/OsX/Linux/.
No Flash/Flex/AIR.
I also would like to ask if PySide does meet my requirements and is it worse or better than wxPython and Tkinter mentioned already?
Use Tkinter. It works on every platform that Python supports, is relatively easy to program in, looks pretty good on most platforms, and has the features you want. It's also built-in for most versions of Python, so your users (in many cases) will not have to install any external dependencies.
I find that Tkinter looks best on Mac OSX and Windows, and slightly outdated on some Gnome desktops. The most important feature, however, is that the API is extremely clean and easy to use and it is very lightweight. PyQt has a similar feature set, but, in my experience, its performance is significantly degraded when compared to Tkinter.
PySide is Nokia's Qt binding for Python. I'm not aware of what the differences are between it and PyQt. Ultimately, most GUI toolkits for Python are going to be cross platform and support the functionality you need. I suggest Tkinter because I feel it is the easiest and most pleasurable way to program GUI applications in Python.
I am the author of Hotot.
according to your requirements, the key for you to choose a framework is the UI framework should be able to access webview conveniently.
Hotot has several wrappers for different platforms. On Linux, we have both Qt and GTK version, on Windows, we provide a Qt version, on Mac, we have a Cocoa version, and of course we have a Chrome version. In a word, all they can easily access webkit.
PS: XULRunner is another good choice for native appearance.
Additionally to the advices given by other people, I suggest you to use PyQt which is a Python binding to Qt framework. It's widely used, cross-platform and feature-full.
Take a look at wxPython (based on wxWidgets). If you want to make it web-based, look into using Django.
Well, you mentioned PyHotOt, and it says (on its web site) that it uses pywebkitgtk, and PyGTK. PyGTK/PyWebKitGTK exists for windows. Did you check it out? I think OS X would be the weak link on GTK, but maybe it's pretty good too.

Python - Best GUI library for the job?

I've been using WxPython and I've tried Tk, but it seems that, while both are good and I'll likely use them for other projects, neither of those appear to be capable of accomplishing the things that I want for my current project (which is fine, they're good at what they do).
Basically what I'm looking for is something that will allow me to make rich graphical GUIs. My specific goal is a window that will draw bitmap buttons, resize the parent window automatically to fit them, and possibly animate the resize with a slide effect and have the buttons fade in. Also being able to have my own window border style instead of the inbuilt one is important to me.
This particular project will be Windows only, so non-portable libraries are fine in this case, though portable ones would be great too.
If I missed how this can be done in either WxPython or Tk, I'm all ears.
PySide: http://www.pyside.org/
The PySide project provides
LGPL-licensed Python bindings for the
Qt cross-platform application and UI
framework. PySide Qt bindings allow
both free open source and proprietary
software development and ultimately
aim to support all of the platforms as
Qt itself.
The Windows version of PySide is quite new and may be considered as a beta version. PySide is API compatible with PyQt.
How about PyQt?
http://www.riverbankcomputing.co.uk/software/pyqt/intro
Just sharing my opinion: Kivy.
Innovative open-source library. Supports both 2.x and 3.x versions of Python.
Kivy - Open source Python library for rapid development of applications
that make use of innovative user interfaces, such as multi-touch apps.
Kivy is based on OpenGL ES 2 and includes native multi-touch for each platform and Android/iOS. It’s an event-driven framework based around a main loop, and is thus also suitable for game development.
Try Pyglet. Its a library for python that makes using OpenGL very easy. You can draw pretty good 2d interfaces using Quads.
I can't tell you what is best because that is subjective but I can give you another option: PyGTK
PyGTK lets you to easily create programs with a graphical user interface using the Python programming language. The underlying GTK+ library provides all kind of visual elements and utilities for it and, if needed, you can develop full featured applications for the GNOME Desktop.
PyGTK applications are truly multiplatform and they're able to run, unmodified, on Linux, Windows, MacOS X and other platforms.

Python GUI Application redistribution

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.

Create a directly-executable cross-platform GUI app using Python

Python works on multiple platforms and can be used for desktop and web applications, thus I conclude that there is some way to compile it into an executable for Mac, Windows and Linux.
The problem being I have no idea where to start or how to write a GUI with it, can anybody shed some light on this and point me in the right direction please?
First you will need some GUI library with Python bindings and then (if you want) some program that will convert your python scripts into standalone executables.
Cross-platform GUI libraries with Python bindings (Windows, Linux, Mac)
Of course, there are many, but the most popular that I've seen in wild are:
Tkinter - based on Tk GUI toolkit (de-facto standard GUI library for python, free for commercial projects)
WxPython - based on WxWidgets (popular, free for commercial projects)
Qt using the PyQt bindings or Qt for Python. The former is not free for commercial projects. The latter is less mature, but can be used for free.
Complete list is at http://wiki.python.org/moin/GuiProgramming
Single executable (all platforms)
PyInstaller - the most active(Could also be used with PyQt)
fbs - if you chose Qt above
Single executable (Windows)
py2exe - used to be the most popular
Single executable (Linux)
Freeze - works the same way like py2exe but targets Linux platform
Single executable (Mac)
py2app - again, works like py2exe but targets Mac OS
Another system (not mentioned in the accepted answer yet) is PyInstaller, which worked for a PyQt project of mine when py2exe would not. I found it easier to use.
http://www.pyinstaller.org/
Pyinstaller is based on Gordon McMillan's Python Installer. Which is no longer available.
An alternative tool to py2exe is bbfreeze which generates executables for windows and linux. It's newer than py2exe and handles eggs quite well. I've found it magically works better without configuration for a wide variety of applications.
There's also PyGTK, which is basically a Python wrapper for the Gnome Toolkit. I've found it easier to wrap my mind around than Tkinter, coming from pretty much no knowledge of GUI programming previously. It works pretty well and has some good tutorials. Unfortunately there isn't an installer for Python 2.6 for Windows yet, and may not be for a while.
Since python is installed on nearly every non-Windows OS by default now, the only thing you really need to make sure of is that all of the non-standard libraries you use are installed.
Having said that, it is possible to build executables that include the python interpreter, and any libraries you use. This is likely to create a large executable, however.
MacOS X even includes support in the Xcode IDE for creating full standalone GUI apps. These can be run by any user running OS X.
For the GUI itself:
PyQT is pretty much the reference.
Another way to develop a rapid user interface is to write a web app,
have it run locally and display the app in the browser.
Plus, if you go for the Tkinter option suggested by lubos hasko
you may want to try portablepy to have your app run on Windows environment
without Python.
I'm not sure that this is the best way to do it, but when I'm deploying Ruby GUI apps (not Python, but has the same "problem" as far as .exe's are concerned) on Windows, I just write a short launcher in C# that calls on my main script. It compiles to an executable, and I then have an application executable.
PySimpleGUI wraps tkinter and works on Python 3 and 2.7. It also runs on Qt, WxPython and in a web browser, using the same source code for all platforms.
You can make custom GUIs that utilize all of the same widgets that you find in tkinter (sliders, checkboxes, radio buttons, ...). The code tends to be very compact and readable.
#!/usr/bin/env python
import sys
if sys.version_info[0] >= 3:
import PySimpleGUI as sg
else:
import PySimpleGUI27 as sg
layout = [[ sg.Text('My Window') ],
[ sg.Button('OK')]]
window = sg.Window('My window').Layout(layout)
button, value = window.Read()
As explained in the PySimpleGUI Documentation, to build the .EXE file you run:
pyinstaller -wF MyGUIProgram.py
!!! KIVY !!!
I was amazed seeing that no one mentioned Kivy!!!
I have once done a project using Tkinter, although they do advocate that it has improved a lot, it still gives me a feel of windows 98, so I switched to Kivy.
I have been following a tutorial series if it helps...
Just to give an idea of how kivy looks, see this (The project I am working on):
And I have been working on it for barely a week now !
The benefits for Kivy you ask? Check this
The reason why I chose this is, its look and that it can be used in mobile as well.
# I'd use tkinter for python 3
import tkinter
tk = tkinter.Tk()
tk.geometry("400x300+500+300")
l = Label(tk,text="")
l.pack()
e = Entry(tk)
e.pack()
def click():
e['text'] = 'You clicked the button'
b = Button(tk,text="Click me",command=click)
b.pack()
tk.mainloop()
# After this I would you py2exe
# search for the use of this module on stakoverflow
# otherwise I could edit this to let you know how to do it
py2exe
Then you should use py2exe, for example, to bring in one folder all the files needed to run the app, even if the user has not python on his pc (I am talking of windows... for the apple os there is no need of an executable file, I think, as it come with python in it without any need of installing it.
Create this file
Create a setup.py
with this code:
from distutils.core import setup
import py2exe
setup(console=['l4h.py'])
save it in a folder
Put your program in the same folder of setup.py
put in this folder the program you want to make it distribuitable:
es: l4h.py
ps: change the name of the file (from l4h to anything you want, that is an example)
Run cmd from that folder (on the folder, right click + shift and choose start cmd here)
write in cmd:>python setup.py py2exe
in the dist folder there are all the files you need
you can zip it and distribute it
Pyinstaller
Install it from cmd
**
pip install pyinstaller
**
Run it from the cmd from the folder where the file is
**
pyinstaller file.py
**
Update
Read this post to make an exe on windows with pyinstaller the proper way and with one file and images in it https://pythonprogramming.altervista.org/auto-py-to-exe-only-one-file-with-images-for-our-python-apps/
You don't need to compile python for Mac/Windows/Linux. It is an interpreted language, so you simply need to have the Python interpreter installed on the system of your choice (it is available for all three platforms).
As for a GUI library that works cross platform, Python's Tk/Tcl widget library works very well, and I believe is sufficiently cross platform.
Tkinter is the python interface to Tk/Tcl
From the python project webpage:
Tkinter is not the only GuiProgramming
toolkit for Python. It is however the
most commonly used one, and almost the
only one that is portable between
Unix, Mac and Windows
You can use appJar for basic GUI development.
from appJar import gui
num=1
def myfcn(btnName):
global num
num +=1
win.setLabel("mylabel", num)
win = gui('Test')
win.addButtons(["Set"], [myfcn])
win.addLabel("mylabel", "Press the Button")
win.go()
See documentation at appJar site.
Installation is made with pip install appjar from command line.
There's three things you could do:
The first thing is to find a GUI Designer that can launch its code as standalone applications like .exe files. I use a version of MatDeck (for people using GUI Designers I recommend MD Python Designer) as I believe(I use another version so I'm not too sure.) it allows me to convert the code to a standalone applications and by having it as such, there is no need to install the software on every PC that's going to run the program.
The second option is partially bypassing the problem, launch the GUI as a web page. This would give you the most compatibility as most if not all OS can utilize it. Once again, you would need a GUI Designer that can convert its components into a web compatible format, I've done it once and I used the same version of MatDeck(Visionary Deck), I would not recommend MD Python Designer this time as I don't know if it can turn its GUIs into websites using web assembly whereas Visionary Deck I've tried and tested. As with all things there are most likely other software this is just one I use frequently because I work a lot with Mathematics and Physics.
The third option is also kind of bypassing the problem but do it in Tkinter and just ensure you have a Python IDE or just plain old Python and run the code, this will launch the GUI. This is a good solution and maybe the simplest but I wouldn't class it as the shortest or the best. If you only plan to switch between a few operating systems and computers this will probably be your best bet.

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