Published on: 01.09.2017

I wanted to create single file that person could run on Windows machine, from my Pythone code.

After some investigation I found PyInstaller and 1 hour later I had my EXE file from Python code.

Process for generating EXE files from Python code with PyInstaller was quite easy, at least from my experience.

I have used it on Windows 7 64-bit and had no problems.

My program was one file script with 300 line and dependencies to docopt and pyautogui.

Steps for generating exe file with PyInstaller

This will install PyInstaller
pip install pyinstaller

This will generate script.exe in dist directory
pyinstaller --onefile script.py

After this you have your EXE program.

How PyInstaller is working

Here I have used --onefile option for PyInstaller what will make one file EXE program.

If you just use pyinstaller script.py, with out --onefile option, than in dist folder you will get folder script with EXE file and all additional files for your EXE file to work.

If you use --onefile option, then your one file EXE program need every time to uncompresses all files every time when it starts.

Uncompression is described in details in official documentation, temporary directory for uncompression in Windows is %TEMP%.

Some other solutions:
http://nsis.sourceforge.net/Main_Page
http://nuitka.net/
https://pypi.python.org/pypi/pynsist
https://cx-freeze.readthedocs.io/en/latest/
http://www.py2exe.org/

Comparison of some others solutions.