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Python 101: Interactively learn how to program with Python 3

Creating an Advanced setup.py File

Explore how to create advanced setup.py files for py2exe to build Windows executables from Python apps. Understand how to manage module includes and excludes, optimize builds, control file bundling, and handle dependencies to distribute your programs effectively.

We'll cover the following...

Let’s see what other options py2exe gives us for creating binaries by creating a more complex setup.py file.

Python
from distutils.core import setup
import py2exe
includes = []
excludes = ['_gtkagg', '_tkagg', 'bsddb', 'curses', 'email', 'pywin.debugger',
            'pywin.debugger.dbgcon', 'pywin.dialogs', 'tcl',
            'Tkconstants', 'Tkinter']
packages = []
dll_excludes = ['libgdk-win32-2.0-0.dll', 'libgobject-2.0-0.dll', 'tcl84.dll',
                'tk84.dll']
setup(
    options = {"py2exe": {"compressed": 2, 
                          "optimize": 2,
                          "includes": includes,
                          "excludes": excludes,
                          "packages": packages,
                          "dll_excludes": dll_excludes,
                          "bundle_files": 3,
                          "dist_dir": "dist",
                          "xref": False,
                          "skip_archive": False,
                          "ascii": False,
                          "custom_boot_script": '',
                         }
              },
    windows=['sampleApp.py']
    )

This is pretty self-explanatory, but let’s unpack it anyway. First we set up a few lists that we pass to the options parameter of the setup function.

  • The includes list is for special modules that you need to specifically include. Sometimes py2exe can’t find certain modules, so you get to manually specify them here.
  • The excludes list is a list of which modules to exclude from your program. In this case, we don’t need Tkinter since we’re using
...