Expert Python Programming - Third Edition

py2exe and py2app

py2exe (http://www.py2exe.org/) and py2app (https://py2app.readthedocs.io/en/latest/) are two complementary programs that integrate with Python packaging either via distutils or setuptools in order to create standalone executables. Here they are mentioned together because they are very similar in both usage and their limitations. The major drawback of py2exe and py2app is that they target only a single platform:

• py2exe allows building Windows executables.
• py2app allows building macOS apps.

Because the usage is very similar and requires only modification of the setup.py script, these packages complement each other. The documentation of the py2app project provides the following example of the setup.py script, which allows ...