Distributing applications that use 3rd party modules

[eliben]

On May 17, 3:23 pm, Mike Driscoll <kyoso... at gmail.com> wrote:
> On May 17, 4:42 am, eliben <eli... at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
>
> > Hello,
>
> > I'm getting into Python now after years of Perl, and as part of my
> > research I must understand how to do some common tasks I need.
>
> > I have a bunch of Windows PCs at work to which I want to distribute an
> > application I've developed on my PC. All these PCs have Python 2.5
> > installed.
>
> > If my application contains only code I've developed, I simply zip its
> > directory with .py files and send it to everyone, who can then use it
> > by running the entry-point .py file. However, what if I've installed
> > some 3rd party modules on my PC, and my application uses them (for
> > example pyparsing, PiYAML and some others) ? I don't want to manually
> > install all these packages (there may be dozens of them) on all those
> > PCs (there may be dozens of those too). What is the best method I can
> > use ? Naturally, I want all the non-standard packages my app uses to
> > be detected automatically and collected into some kind of convenient
> > distributable that is easy to pass around and run.
>
> > I'm aware of py2exe - tried it and it works fine. But it creates huge
> > executables, and I don't want to distribute those all the time. I much
> > prefer a zipped directory of .py scripts that takes some 10s of KBs.
>
> > Thanks in advance,
> > Eli
>
> You might want to check out Buildout. It allows you to run all that
> stuff in it's own virtual world, so to speak. I'm planning on playing
> with it this week.
>

I looked at its examples and I'm not sure it's what I need. It seems
useful for other cases though.

> Also, there's this site which has collected the various means of
> distributing Python apps:
>
> http://www.freehackers.org/Packaging_a_python_program
>

This page only talks about the packagers that create .exe files that
don't need Python installed.


Is there a simple way to find out which packages are used by my
script ?

Eli