py2exe - generate single executable file

Question

I thought I heard that py2exe was able to do this, but I never figured it out. Has anyone successfully done this? Can I see your setup.py file, and what command line options you used?

Basically I'm thinking of it giving me a single executable file that does something like unzips itself to maybe /temp and runs.

Answer 1

The way to do this using py2exe is to use the bundle_files option in your setup.py file. For a single file you will want to set bundle_files to 1, compressed to True, and set the zipfile option to None. That way it creates one compressed file for easy distribution.

Here is a more complete description of the bundle_file option quoted directly from the py2exe site*

Using "bundle_files" and "zipfile"

An easier (and better) way to create single-file executables is to set bundle_files to 1 or 2, and to set zipfile to None. This approach does not require extracting files to a temporary location, which provides much faster program startup.

Valid values for bundle_files are:

• 3 (default) don't bundle
• 2 bundle everything but the Python interpreter
• 1 bundle everything, including the Python interpreter

If zipfile is set to None, the files will be bundle within the executable instead of library.zip.

Here is a sample setup.py:

from distutils.core import setup
import py2exe, sys, os

sys.argv.append('py2exe')

setup(
    options = {'py2exe': {'bundle_files': 1, 'compressed': True}},
    windows = [{'script': "single.py"}],
    zipfile = None,
)