Automated Program Launchers
Suppose, for just a moment, that you wish to ship Python
programs to an audience that may be in the very early stages of
evolving from computer user to computer programmer. Maybe you are
shipping a Python application to nontechnical users, or perhaps you’re
interested in shipping a set of Python demo programs with a book.
Whatever the reason, some of the people who will use your software
can’t be expected to do anything more than click a mouse. They
certainly won’t be able to edit their system configuration files to
set things such as PATH and
PYTHONPATH per your programs’
assumptions. Your software will have to configure itself.
Luckily, Python scripts can do that too. In the next three sections, we’re going to study three modules that aim to automatically launch programs with minimal assumptions about the environment on the host machine:
- Launcher.py
A library of tools for automatically configuring the shell environment in preparation for launching a Python script. It can be used to set required shell variables—both the
PATHsystem program search path (used to find the “python” executable) and thePYTHONPATHmodule search path (used to resolve imports within scripts). Because such variable settings made in a parent program are inherited by spawned child programs, this interface lets scripts preconfigure search paths for other scripts.- LaunchBrowser.py
Aims to portably locate and start an Internet browser program on the host machine in order to view a local ...