Freezing Your Code

An alternative to shipping your code is freezing it — shipping it as an executable with a bundled Python interpreter.

Many applications you use every day do this:

• Dropbox
• BitTorrent
• ...

Todo

Fill in “Freezing Your Code” stub

Comparison

Solutions and platforms/features supported:

Solution	Windows	Linux	OS X	Python 3	License	One-file mode	Zipfile import	Eggs	pkg_resources support
bbFreeze	yes	yes	yes	no	MIT	no	yes	yes	yes
py2exe	yes	no	no	yes	MIT	yes	yes	no	no
pyInstaller	yes	yes	yes	no	GPL	yes	no	yes	no
cx_Freeze	yes	yes	yes	yes	PSF	no	yes	yes	no
py2app	no	no	yes	yes	MIT	no	yes	yes	yes

Note

Freezing Python code on Linux into a Windows executable was only once supported in PyInstaller and later dropped..

Note

All solutions need MS Visual C++ dll to be installed on target machine, except py2app. Only Pyinstaller makes self-executable exe that bundles the dll when passing --onefile to Configure.py.

Windows

bbFreeze

Prerequisite is to install Python, Setuptools and pywin32 dependency on Windows.

Todo

Write steps for most basic .exe

py2exe

Prerequisite is to install Python on Windows.

1. Download and install http://sourceforge.net/projects/py2exe/files/py2exe/
2. Write setup.py (List of configuration options):

from distutils.core import setup
import py2exe

setup(
    windows=[{'script': 'foobar.py'}],
)

3. (Optionally) include icon
4. (Optionally) one-file mode
5. Generate .exe into dist directory:

$ python setup.py py2exe

6. Provide the Microsoft Visual C runtime DLL. Two options: globally install dll on target machine or distribute dll alongside with .exe.

PyInstaller

Prerequisite is to have installed Python, Setuptools and pywin32 dependency on Windows.

• Most basic tutorial
• Manual

OS X

py2app

PyInstaller

Linux

bbFreeze

PyInstaller