Executable_building.txt

# This framework evolved from a collaboration of:
# - Research Laboratory of Electronics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambdrige, MA, US
# - Pattern Recognition Lab, Friedrich-Alexander-Universitaet Erlangen-Nuernberg, Germany
# - Department of Biomedical Engineering, Peking University, Beijing, China
# - New England Eye Center, Tufts Medical Center, Boston, MA, US
# v1.0: Updated on Mar 20, 2019
# @author: Daniel Stromer - EMAIL:daniel.stromer@fau.de
# Copyright (C) 2018-2019 - Daniel Stromer
# PRLE is developed as an Open Source project under the GNU General Public License (GPL) v3.0.

The executable file can be found in the "dist/PRLEC/ folder and is named "PRLEC_OCT_Processing.exe".
When built new, it is called PRLEC.exe.

For building an executable file, the author used pyinstaller.

The following steps were necessary to successfully create an .exe file.

a) Install modules if necessary
	i) pip install pyinstaller
	i) pip install -U setuptools

b) We faced the problem that pyinstaller could not autoamtically fetch skimage.io. We added
   a hook manually. To do so, create a file named "hook-skimage.io.py: with the following 
   content (taken from https://stackoverflow.com/a/35043355):

	from PyInstaller.utils.hooks import collect_data_files, collect_submodules

	datas = collect_data_files("skimage.io._plugins")`
	hiddenimports = collect_submodules('skimage.io._plugins')

   Place this file in the hook folder of pyinstaller. For us, this directory was found at:
   C:/users/mit/appdata/local/programs/python/pyhton35/lib/site-packages/pyinstaller/hooks/

c) The spec is already generated. Only if you added new things, you may have to adapt it.
   You can create an executable by changing to the work directory in the shell and running:

   pyinstaller prlec.spec

   The .exe file will be located in the "dist" directory.