temp files being deleted

[Dan203]

Reported this in #3301 but it still doesn't work the --runtime_tmpdir command nor the .spec option work for Windows builds. It still extracts to the regular system TEMP folder and if left running long enough the "unused" files get cleaned up by Windows (mostly icons and graphics files that are only loaded at startup) and then the program is all messed up.

In my case it's a tray app that's intended to run all the time, so after a week or so the tray icon gets messed up and the user has to restart the program for it to function properly again.

Any chance we could get the runtime_tmpdir functioning in Windows?

[Dan203]

A user just pointed out that this is in fact working, kind of. Instead of extracting to the folder I specified in the .spec file it's extractinging to the root of C:. So the flag is doing something, maybe my path syntax is just wrong? I'll have to play with it and see if can get it to work correctly.

[Dan203]

I couldn’t figure out any path format that worked for this. If I had any path in there at all it caused the temp files to be extracted to the root of C:, which is an issue for standard user accounts because they’re not allowed to write directly to the root, or if I remove it then it goes back to temp. I tried both the command line switch and a line in the .spec file with the same results.

Ultimately I reverted to using temp and dealing with the issues that causes. If anyone has a hint on how to make this work for a Windows app please let me know.

[htgoebel]

The code is in pyi_utils.c:
pyi_create_temp_path() just takes the value of option pyi-runtime-tmpdir and passes it on to pyi_get_temp_path(). The later temporary changes %TMP% to the value of pyi-runtime-tmpdir.

Since the value is not toughed in any case, there might be some issues between characters and long characters. Do you have non-ascii in you path?

PS: Mind: PyInstaller is still in need of funding, see #4404

[Dan203]

No. I tried hard coding just a simple path like c:\pyTivo, I tried using the appdata folder, I tried using the programdata folder. I tried with and without quotes. I tried with and without escaping the slashes. It either created them in the normal temp directory or created it right in the root of C. I was actually going to just leave it in the root of C as I thought that was better than files getting randomly getting deleted from the temp folder and causing issues, but then I started getting complaints that non-admin accounts aren’t allowed to just write to the root of C so the program would just fail.

This was for a Windows only build. I do have a Mac version of the app, but I wasn’t trying to update it yet.

[mcsimps2]

I'll also add to the conversation that I'm experiencing this bug - in my case, I'm actually getting cacert.pem deleted, which is causing TLS issues with the requests library. I can also vouch that, trying to use --runtime-tmpdir only moves the _MEI extraction folder to the root of the drive and not to the specified location.

[mcsimps2]

PR open. If you need to, checkout that branch; the following tests work:

• pyinstaller --onefile --runtime-tmpdir ^%LOCALAPPDATA^%\MyNewApp app.py
• pyinstaller --onefile --runtime-tmpdir C:\Users\ms\randomfolder app.py
• pyinstaller --onefile --runtime-tmpdir . app.py (unpackages the app in the same directory where it exists)

app.py:

import sys
if __name__ == "__main__":
    print(f"The app is running in directory {sys._MEIPASS}")