Jaime Carranza -

Created Thu Apr, 25 2024 at 02:24AM

Getting pyinstaller to work with --onefile and an external config

TLDR; My example below adds a .env file and util_data dir with additional config .ini files. run:

pyi-makespec --onefile myutil.py --add-data=".env:." --add-data="util_data:."

now go edit the spec by putting the following at the bottom

import shutil
shutil.copyfile('.env', '{0}/.env'.format(DISTPATH))
shutil.copytree('my_data', '{0}\\my_data'.format(DISTPATH))

finally run the pyinstaller pointing to the new spec

pyinstaller --clean myutil.spec

All credit for this goes to Stefano Giraldi original post

I've used the shutil module and .spec file to add extra data files (in my case, a config-sample.ini file) to dist folder using the PyInstaller --onefile option.

Make a .spec file for PyInstaller

First of all, I've created a makespec file with the options I needed:

pyi-makespec --onefile --windowed --name exefilename scriptname.py

This command creates an exefilename.spec file to use with PyInstaller.

Modify exefilename.spec, adding shutil.copyfile

Now I've edited the exefilename.spec, adding the following code at the end of the file.

import shutil

shutil.copyfile('config-sample.ini', '{0}/config-sample.ini'.format(DISTPATH))
shutil.copyfile('whateveryouwant.ext', '{0}/whateveryouwant.ext'.format(DISTPATH))

This code copies the data files needed at the end of the compile process. You could use all the methods available in the shutil package.

Run PyInstaller

The final step is to run the compile process

pyinstaller --clean exefilename.spec

The result is that in the dist folder you should have the compiled .exe file together with the data files copied.

Consideration

In the official documentation of PyInstaller I didn't find an option to get this result. I think it could be considered as a workaround... that works.

Here is how to access files that are on the same level as the output file. The trick is that the sys.executable is where the one-file .exe is located. So simply this does the trick:

import sys
import os.path
CWD = os.path.abspath(os.path.dirname(sys.executable))

Use it e.g. with

with open(os.path.join(CWD, "config.ini")) as config_file:
    print(config_file.read())

The reason why `os.getcwd()`/relative paths don't work

The executable is just an executable archive that is extracted on execution to a temporary directory, where the .pyc files are executed. So when you call os.getcwd() instead of the path to the executable, you get the path to the temporary folder.

pyinstaller with external config file