Python Executable

Simple script and recipe how to quickly make linux executable out of python project (where python is already installed)

Quickstart

Copy package-project.py file to your python project root. Amend it to suite your needs/project structure. See for defaults below.

When you want to package it - just run:

python3 package-project.py

from root of your project (or anywhere really) and result will be in target/your-executable. It will contain all but python3 interpreter. You can run it with:

./your-executable <parameters to be passed to your python code>

Target Platforms

This is targeted to platforms where bash shell is installed. Originally it was made for Raspberry Pi (actually simple ARM Debian distro) and OSX, but it is not limited to them.

What Is It?

This was inspired with couple of decades or more old trick which I learnt with Java: jar files are actually zip files. Zip files, due their design can be prepended with any arbitrary content and still being valid zip files (due to reference to table of contents/directory is actually at the end of the file). So, with Java you can always add following to the beginning of zip file:

java -jar $0

If you rename it with dropping .jar and add executable flag (chmod +x my.jar) it will loook as any other command but under the hood will execute script which will run your 'executable jar'. You can package your code in some kind of 'uber-jar' to satisfy external dependencies.

This script creates pretty much the same thing:

• it installs all your python requirements from requirements.txt (modify if it is called differently) to some temp directory)
• does optionally some light templating (by adding timestamp after version defined in VERSION file)
• zips up all your source directories (configurable) along with requirements and version
• prepends shell (bash) script to zip file renaming all to name you put in the package script
• adds executable flag to resulting file (found in target/<your-executable>)

Defaults

Script suggests some defaults but does not insist on them. build script below is refering to package-project.py python file (the build script).

Directory Structure

By default it expects to have following directory structure:

/src
/src/python  <- your code can live here
/src/resources <- non-python files can live here
requirements.txt  <- your project's requirements files
VERSION <- simple file with some version like 1.0

If you want to change it just update SOURCE_PATHS list at the top of the build script.

Requirements

The build script expects to have requirements.txt (see above) in same directory. That file can be empty. If you want to change the name (or path) change REQUIREMENTS_FILE variable in the build script. Comment out or remove install_requirements(REQUIREMENTS_FILE, target_directory=TARGET_REQUIREMENTS_PATH) line near the end of the build script if you dont' need it.

Version

The build script provides way of adding version (with build timestamp) to the resulting zip file. There's file called 'VERSION' with content 1.0. The build script takes that file and appends current date and timestamp to it while creating resulting file. Date and timestamp is in YYYYMMDDHHmmss format. If you want to change it see update_build_version method. If you don't want it, just comment out or remove update_build_version(VERSION_FILE, TARGET_TEMPLATES_PATH) line near the end of the build script. At the same time you can comment out or remove VERSION_FILE variable (near the top of the build script).

Further Ideas

If you want to access files from, for instance, src/resource directory, you can always use local_resources project (see here https://pypi.org/project/local-resources/0.0.1/). It will happily provide you with binary file-like object for all files packaged in this zip file.