Creating true standalone applications in Python

NOTE This document is obsolete. See Freezing Python scripts for a more up-to-date treatise.

You can use Python to create true standalone macintosh applications: applications that you can distribute to other people as a single file, without dependencies on Python being installed, etc. The process is not easy, however, and at the moment you need a source distribution (and a C development environment, CodeWarrior most preferred). You should first familiarize yourself with the sections building Python from source and building applets.

The application we are going to build will contain a complete interpreter, plus 'PYC ' resources for all the Python modules the program uses. We start by creating a resource file that contains all the modules we need, in PYC-resource form. There are two ways to do this:

Modify the standard freeze.py module to print the names of all modules used. Copy these to a single folder, run compileall.py on that folder and then run PackLibDir.py from the scripts folder to create the resourcefile. This has one disadvantage: freeze finds the modules used by parsing your Python code, so modules you don't use (for instance because they are system-dependent and not used on the mac) are also included. You may also have problems with dynamically loaded modules. You will also have to rename your main module to __main__.py.
Another way to find the modules used is by option-starting your script and setting the "interactive mode after script" flag. Exercise every corner of your program so all your modules have been imported, and when you exit your program and get back to the interpreter use findmodulefiles.findmodulefiles to get a list of all modules used. You can now use findmodulefiles.mkpycresourcefile to create your resourcefile.

Next we create the application project. Copy the PythonStandalone.prj project, replace macapplication.c by macapplet.c and replace bundle.rsrc by appletbundle.rsrc. Also add the PYC resource file you made in the previous step and any other resource files you need. Set the target output file names (for all three of ppc/68k/fat). Build your application.

Finally we have to give the application the right sys.path initialisation. We do this by dropping the application on EditPythonPrefs and removing all path components replacing them with a single $(APPLICATION). You may have to use ResEdit after this step to remove an "alis" resource from your application, I am not sure why this is sometimes created.

If you want to get fancy you may be able to make your application smaller by removing all unused builtin modules. If you used the findmodulefiles method above to find your modules you can start a standalone interpreter and use findmodulefiles.findunusedbuiltins to get the names of all builtin modules your program doesn't use. You can then create a private copy of config.c from which you remove all unused modules.