cx_Freeze, again
It's been a long time since the last post and for sure I was not thiking about another post about cx_Freeze. I have spent this week end trying (and at the end succeding) to build an update to an old software. For future memory I'll write briefly the steps needed to get a functional build without losing my mind.
Brief description of the problem
The software is a desktop application used to upload email attachments to a web based data store; the application talk to the web app using a "RESTy" api, and fetches the file from a email address; the GUI is written with the beatiful PyQT5 (someone may prefere PySide) and usually this dependency is a pain to work with but I have to admit that the newer version installs gracefuly.
OS version and things to download
The person using this software needs to run it from a Windows OS and at this time Windows 7 is the oldes worsion of the OS I want to support (no Vista, please) since addressing Windows 10 will produce an executable with no retro compatibily and Windows 8 have less installs than 7.
The first software needed to be dowloaded is obviusly the Python 3.5 interpreter and after its installation came the first surprise, it doesn't run because of some missing dlls; after some research I have downloaded the redistribuitable runtime and it started to work as expected.
After Python was ready I've had to install the pip utility which was not automatically installed, maybe I have forgotten to chek the corresponding option in the installer; anyway everything installed correctly using it, this is a brief list of dependencies:
- requests: OK
- paramiko: OK
- imapclient: OK
- PyQT: (surprisingly!) OK
- cx_Freeze: Not ok at all..
cx_Freeze requires Widonws build tools that can freely (as in beer) downloaded and installed but even after that I was not able to install it from pip; fortunately some kind people provided a procompiled wheel for it but be sure to download the 5.0 version because the 4.x was not able to produce a proper executable.
Additional dependencies and some setup.py notes
Having not touched I tought that the setup script was soemwhat correct since the last build was succesful, nothing more far from the truth; the first thing has been a nice surprise, cx_Freeze recognized correctly all the dlls to use in the final package and referencing additional dlls is not needed anymore, good work cx_Freeze guys!
After the first build ihave started a cycle of try, fix retry until the application could as expected, here is a list of additional dependencis that I had to install and reference in the setup.py file:
- appdir
- packaging
- atexit
appdir and atexit only need to be referenced as packages instead packaging requires some more fine tuining so I had to add this additional sub_packages to the includes settings of the build_exe_options dictionary:
- packaging.version
- packaging.specifiers
- packaging.requirements
Final words
It took me a couple of hours of trial/error to be able to ship the build and I hope to not have to repeat this madness again soon; if I'll need to create a new build in the future I hope that this little post will halp me not to waste my time again.