PythonCall not playing nicely with pyinstaller

[KeithWM]

First of all I'd like to express my appreciation for all the great work being done here. I think this package is a great facilitator for moving Julia out of it's initial niche towards integration into real, practical applications.

In that line, I've been trying to call Julia from a Python application that is then made into a (Windows) executable using pyinstaller. This did not work "out of the box". After a lot of digging, I discovered the bug was in the init_consts function, in particular in the evaluation of

:(pycopy!(pybuiltins.help, pybuiltinsmodule.help)), 

Commenting the :help in src/constants/consts.jl:66 gave a working application, much to my joy and that of my colleagues, but I don't know exactly why this helped, and if there's any downside to doing this. Even if my immediate problem has been resolved/avoided, I thought I should share what I found for the benefit of the community.

[cjdoris]

Thanks for the report. It seems very odd indeed that that line would be the problematic one, but ok!

The downside of commenting out that line is that trying to use pybuiltins.help will likely crash your program horribly. Provided you don't use it you're good!

Do you have a MWE for this issue please? I have never used pyinstaller.

[KeithWM]

Sorry for not responding yet. It was a bit of a rush to get something delivered at the time, now I have some more time, I will see what I can share to illustrate the issue.

[cjdoris]

Looking at the help docs it looks like builtins.help is only available if site is imported, which pyinstaller presumably skips because it needs to control its own import path.

I can easily make that problematic line work by setting help=None if it's not available.

[cjdoris]

I have fixed this on the main branch now, to appear in the next release. Thanks for the report.

[KeithWM]

Just going to post a link to the commit for reference.

d223561

[MrHenning]

@KeithWM would you mind sharing how you managed to include juliacall in a PyInstaller app?
I am trying to do this on Linux, and I can't manage to get it to work.

Having an example (albeit on Windows) could still help! 🙂

[KeithWM]

I think the only thing I did was to comment the line src/constants/consts.jl:66 as mentioned in the original post. But I have the impression it has been solved now anyway. Sorry if that isn't enough help.

[MrHenning]

Thanks @KeithWM for answering 🙂
I actually meant how you handled the PyInstaller part.

In my minial build (on Linux) I have from juliacall import Main as jl, and when running the code it works, but trying to run the bundled app I get an error

ERROR: ArgumentError: Package PythonCall not found in current path.
- Run `import Pkg; Pkg.add("PythonCall")` to install the PythonCall package.

Do you do anything special in your PyInstaller command / .spec file? Including the julia binaries maybe?