Creating standalone applications with Python

With the macfreeze script you can freeze a Python script: create a fullblown Macintosh application that is completely self-contained. A frozen application is similar to an applet (see Example 2 for information on creating applets), but where an applet depends on an existing Python installation for its standard modules and interpreter core, a frozen program does not, because it incorporates everything in a single binary. This means you can copy a frozen program to a machine that does not have Python installed and it will work, which is not true for an applet.

There are two ways to create a frozen application: through the CodeWarrior development environment or without any development environment. The former method is more versatile and may result in smaller binaries, because you can better customize what is included in your eventual application. The latter method builds an application by glueing together the various .slb shared libraries that come with a binary Python installation into a single file. This method of freezing, which does not require you to spend money on a development environment, is unique to MacPython, incidentally, on other platforms you will always need a C compiler and linker.

Common steps

The two processes have a number of steps in common. When you start Mac:Tools:macfreeze:macfreeze.py you are asked for the script file, and you can select which type of freeze to do. The first time you should always choose report only, which will produce a listing of modules and where they are included from in the console window. Macfreeze actually parses all modules, so it may crash in the process. If it does try again with a higher debug value, this should show you where it crashes.

For more elaborate programs you will often see that freeze includes modules you don't need (because they are for a different platform, for instance) or that it cannot find all your modules (because you modify sys.path early in your initialization). It is possible to include directives to tell macfreeze to add items to the search path and include or exclude certain modules. All your directives should be in the main script file.

Directives have the following form:

# macfreeze: command argument

The trigger macfreeze: must be spelled exactly like that, but the whitespace can be any combination of spaces and tabs. Macfreeze understands the following directives:

path: Prepend a folder to sys.path. The argument is a pathname, which should probably be relative (starting with a colon) and is interpreted relative to the folder where the script lives.
include: Include a module. The module can either be given by filename or by module name, in which case it is looked up through the normal method.
exclude: Exclude a module. The module must be given by modulename. Even when freeze deems the module necessary it will not be included in the application.

There is actually a fourth way that macfreeze can operate: it can be used to generate only the resource file containing the compiled PYC resources. This may be useful if you have embedded Python in your own application. The resource file generated is the same as for the CodeWarrior generation process.

Freezing with CodeWarrior

To freeze with CodeWarrior you need CodeWarrior, obviously, and a full source distribution of Python. You select the Codewarrior source and project option. You specify an output folder, which is by default the name of your script with .py removed and build. prepended. If the output folder does not exist yet it is created, and a template project file and bundle resource file are deposited there. Next, a source file macfreezeconfig.c is created which includes all builtin modules your script uses, and a resource file frozenmodules.rsrc which contains the PYC resources for all your Python modules.

The project expects to live in a folder one level below the Python root folder, so the next thing you should do is move the build folder there. It is a good idea to leave an alias with the same name in the original location: when you run freeze again it will regenerate the frozenmodules.rsrc file but not the project and bundle files. This is probably what you want: if you modify your python sources you have to re-freeze, but you may have changed the project and bundle files, so you don't want to regenrate them.

An alternative is to leave the build folder where it is, but then you have to adapt the search path in the project.

The project is set up to include all the standard builtin modules, but the CW linker is smart enough to exclude any object code that isn't referenced. Still, it may be worthwhile to remove any sources for modules that you are sure are not used to cut back on compilation time. You may also want to examine the various resource files (for Tcl/Tk, for instance): the loader has no way to know that these aren't used.

You may also need to add sourcefiles if your script uses non-standard builtin modules, like anything from the Extensions folder.

The frozenbundle.rsrc resource file contains the bundle information. It is almost identical to the bundle file used for applets, with the exception that it sets the sys.path initialization to $(APPLICATION) only. This means that all modules will only be looked for in PYC resources in your application.

Freezing without CodeWarrior

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