Python app calls a native command line tool - how to bundle?

[clstaudt]

My Python app calls wkhtmltopdf via pdfkit.

Apparently this does no longer work when the bundled app is started by double click and not from the terminal.

What would be the correct way to enable this?

[rokm]

What OS is that? Can you provide a minimal example?

[clstaudt]

macOS, Linux, and Windows. I would need some time to work out a minimal example - meanwhile, this is the demo app: https://github.com/tuttle-dev/tuttle/releases

The general question is whether it is possible to not only bundle Python libraries but also native tools which are called by the Python libraries. It would not be practical to have the user install the tool separately.

[bwoodsend]

The short answer is yes. You can --add-data an executable and launch it via subprocess. You should ideally vendor it inside your tuttle package, locating it relative to tuttle.__file__ then it more or less ceases to be a PyInstaller problem.

[rokm]

That depends on the tool itself - whether it is portable (has no hardcoded absolute paths) and whether it is self-contained enough to be collected into your application bundle without having to collect half the OS with it. It also depends on how the python library finds the tool.

With pdfkit, the following seems to work on Windows:

# program.py
import sys
import os
if getattr(sys, 'frozen', False):
    os.environ['PATH'] = sys._MEIPASS + os.pathsep + os.environ['PATH']
import pdfkit
pdfkit.from_url('http://google.com', 'out.pdf')

pyinstaller ^
  --clean  ^
  --noconfirm  ^
  program.py  ^
  --add-binary c:\Users\Rok\Downloads\wkhtmltox\bin\wkhtmltoimage.exe;.  ^
  --add-binary c:\Users\Rok\Downloads\wkhtmltox\bin\wkhtmltox.dll;.  ^
  --add-binary c:\Users\Rok\Downloads\wkhtmltox\bin\wkhtmltopdf.exe;.

I.e., we collect wkhtmltox to top-level application dir, and set PATH accordingly in the program before trying to import pdfkit, so it can discover the executable via where.exe.

[rokm]

I wonder how trying to run which behaves within an macOS app bundle, though (notwithstanding the limited environment variables when running the bundle via double-click).