Bundled Single Executable on Windows

Windows Single Executable

Windows users are used to programs being a single .exe file that can be
doubleclicked to run. We can produce that kind of user experience, targetting
especially users that are less tech-savvy and e.g. have IE11 as their default
browser which can be problematic. An alternative may be us giving them a
download link to our “app” program, which is basically a bundled Chrome that
loads our web application URL on startup.

The following is one of the many ways to get there:
– Use nativefier to create a portable Chrome loading our web app. Ideally you should build on the target platform (Windows 7 or 10 in our case) Command may look like this:

$ nativefier --name=MyProject "https://myproject.com" --maximize --single-instance

• This gives us a folder with an executable and a whole bunch of other stuff like .dll files, not very convient yet.
• We can bundle this into a protable single executable for people to download and run.
• Of the many broken ways to do this on Windows I found this one to work. Assuming package is the directory created by nativefier and main.py a script as below:
  • Download Python 2.7 (on 3.5, pyinstaller on Windows 10 has huge issues bundling builtin dll files)
  • Create a main.py like below:

  # main.py
  import sys, os
  
  if getattr(sys, 'frozen', False):
      bundle_dir = sys._MEIPASS
  else:
      bundle_dir = os.path.dirname(os.path.abspath(__file__))
  
  exe = os.path.join(bundle_dir, "MyProject.exe")
  os.system(exe)
  

  • Install pyinstaller and run it against the script:

  $ pip install virtualenv
  $ virtualenv venv
  $ venv\Scripts\activate
  $ pip install pyinstaller
  $ pyinstaller main.py --onefile --add-data="package;."
  

  • This will produce dist/main.exe which is our single runnable executable. pyinstaller can also be used to add an icon file --icon=app.ico

All bundled up!