[Pythonmac-SIG] New to Python - how to get Py2App to work?

[Christopher Barker]

Nehemiah Dacres wrote:
>  for a gui app I would 
> simply use platypus <http://www.sveinbjorn.org/platypus> and include 
> what ever libraries I needed for the gui 

It would be interesting for someone to do a comparison of Platypus and 
py2app, but at a glance it looks like you'd need to do a lot of hand 
work to include everything you need for your app with Platypus. Py2app 
does all that for you -- at least most of the time!

Yes, those docs are a bit sparse, there was a better one somewhere, but 
I can't find it at the moment. This doc from the pyObjC project may help.

http://pyobjc.sourceforge.net/documentation/pyobjc-core/tutorial/index.html

Here's the quick version:

1) you need to use the command line. If you've only ever run python 
script from IDLE or something, it's time to fire up Terminal and learn a 
bit about the command line.

2) You need a setup.py file for your app. There is a way to 
auto-generate a simple one that I forget at the moment, but the one in 
the PyObjC tutorial is a fine start:

from distutils.core import setup
import py2app

datafiles = [] # I'm keeping this here, as it will be handy later.

setup(
     app=['TheNameOfYOurMainScript.py'],
     data_files=[],
)


It's that simple (for the simple case!)

To run it, type:

$ python setup.py py2app

at the command line in the same dir as the setup.py file and your main 
script. It should build an app bundle and put it in the "dist" folder 
that it creates.

Once you've got that, I'd search the web and the archives of this list 
for examples of more complex apps -- adding application icon, etc.

Also, I think there are some examples distributed with Py2app.

-Chris






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Christopher Barker, Ph.D.
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