Try cx_freeze for packaging CLI program

[sgillies]

I'm not sure if this is the way to go, but I've been curious about cx_freeze.

See also #18.

[sgillies]

It appears that our use of setuptools' pkg_resources is incompatible with cx_freeze. We'd need to change the program design to use cx_freeze.

[perrygeo]

There's also pyinstaller and bbfreeze (unmaintained) both of which can theoretically create cross-platform binaries.

There are some other options out there but they all seem to be platform specific:

• py2exe for win
• py2app for os x
• exxo for x64 linux

There's also the perhaps insane idea of supporting Jython or zippy and packaging it as a jar file to run on the JVM. 😵

[perrygeo]

pyinstaller looks active and promising but it looks like it doesn't support console_scripts in setup.py

EDIT: It theoretically does using this workaround

[perrygeo]

Update on pyinstaller: It works, sorta. Instead of using click_plugins.with_plugins to dynamically pull the subcommands from the entry points, you can explictly define subcommand as part of a group

+from .cli  import main_group

-@click.command(short_help="Geocode an address or coordinates.")
+@main_group.command(short_help="Geocode an address or coordinates.")

write the main cli.py as a wrapper script to do explicit imports

from mapboxcli.scripts.geocoding import geocoding

if __name__ == "__main__":
    main_group()

then run pyinstaller on the wrapper script to produce an executable

$ file dist/mapbox/mapbox
mapbox: Mach-O 64-bit executable x86_64

and geocoding works as expected.

Implications of this approach? Compiled script means no dynamic plugins at runtime, lose the ability to do user plugins.

[sgillies]

Too old. I don't think we're going to go this route.