pyzipper

A small tool to package up a Python program and associated data files as a single executable zip file.

All the facilities for this are already built into Python, this script just ties it all together with a bow.

demo1 and demo2 are two trivial sample packages.

The Makefile is just a driver for the demos. pyzipper itself is all you need if you want to use this yourself.

Tested with both Python 2 and Python 3, should work with either.

How it works

This relies on two somewhat obscure Python features:

The zipfile.PyZipFile class's ability to construct an executable ZIP file and populate it with Python modules, packages, and data; and
Python's ability to treat a zip file as equivalent to a directory tree on import.

demo1 takes advantage of a third obscure feature: the pkgutil library's ability to load data files via the import system.

Usage

This is what pyzipper --help returns as of this writing. The program itself is authoritative, this is just a snapshot for convenience.

usage: pyzipper [-h] -o OUTPUT [-m MODULE] [-e EXECUTABLE] source

Generate an executable Python zip package.

positional arguments:
  source

optional arguments:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  -o OUTPUT, --output OUTPUT
  -m MODULE, --module MODULE
                        module within package to run (default: main)
  -e EXECUTABLE, --executable EXECUTABLE
                        python executable to run (default: python)