py2app packaging

[johnty]

I've been experimenting with the packaging process, and have ran into the following:

• seems like an older version (0.16) of py2app is needed
• how large the package you end up with, depends heavily on the python environment regardless of what libraries you're using for the application itself. as such i think the best way is to use a clean virtualenv. (this could also explain why in the past we generated binaries of different sizes... i just tried with the anaconda installed version of python and made a 400MB file ;)
• however, there seem to be some missing libraries depending on what configuration you start with. currently for some reason libffi is not being included automatically in my particular setup.

the basic process to bundle the package is to just run the following after py2app is installed:

python setup.py py2app

also note that currently setup.py doesn't include the html folder in data_files, so that needs to be added to the list for the base html file to be included in the package it seems.

[radarsat1]

On dimple I have been experimenting with using Travis to package builds. It works well, you can generate a "build artifact" and then post it to the "gh-pages" branch which makes it show up on github.io. That way it would be done in a clean environment automatically with all reproducibility instructions in one place.

[johnty]

Thanks Steve! I think getting it on Travis would be great as a way to automate the builds on a clean system.

In the mean time, I've figured out that we can explicitly pass the following argument to py2app:

python setup.py py2app --frameworks /opt/local/lib/libffi.6.dylib

This is somewhat strange still, since on systems where it initially fails, libffi is usually present but for some reason the embedded python runtime from the built pacakge is not looking there. I expect there's a bad configuration in my setup somewhere... On systems where the package doesn't run, I can simply copy over the local version of libffi alongside the embedded dylibs, and everything will work fine. For now the above explicit inclusion works, except I also found that in my particular case a system before High Sierra (10.12) does not like that version of libffi...

[ChristianFrisson]

Hi libmapper/webmapper team,

On Ubuntu / Pop!_OS 20.04, pip3 install py2app then python3 setup.py py2app fails with:

copying file build/bdist.linux-x86_64/python3.8-standalone/app/python38.zip -> dist/WebMapper.app/Contents/Resources/lib
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "setup.py", line 17, in <module>
    setup(name='WebMapper',
  File "/usr/lib/python3.8/distutils/core.py", line 148, in setup
    dist.run_commands()
  File "/usr/lib/python3.8/distutils/dist.py", line 966, in run_commands
    self.run_command(cmd)
  File "/usr/lib/python3.8/distutils/dist.py", line 985, in run_command
    cmd_obj.run()
  File "~/.local/lib/python3.8/site-packages/py2app/build_app.py", line 907, in run
    self._run()
  File "~/.local/lib/python3.8/site-packages/py2app/build_app.py", line 1125, in _run
    self.run_normal()
  File "~/.local/lib/python3.8/site-packages/py2app/build_app.py", line 1238, in run_normal
    self.create_binaries(py_files, pkgdirs, extensions, loader_files)
  File "~/.local/lib/python3.8/site-packages/py2app/build_app.py", line 1545, in create_binaries
    dst = self.build_executable(
  File "~/.local/lib/python3.8/site-packages/py2app/build_app.py", line 2315, in build_executable
    self.copy_file(zlib.__file__, os.path.dirname(arcdir))
AttributeError: module 'zlib' has no attribute '__file__'

From the first line I assume packaging has been developed for macOS only?

Kind regards, Christian

[radarsat1]

It's been a while, but I thought the Windows equivalent of py2app was py2exe. Probably things have changed.

[ChristianFrisson]

Answer from the py2app website: py2app - Create standalone Mac OS X applications with Python.

Maybe the libmapper README could state "To build standalone application on macOS"?

[malloch]

Hi Christian,

Thanks for the feedback – I updated the documentation with the changes you suggested.

Cheers, Joe

On May 26, 2020, at 7:00 PM, Christian Frisson notifications@github.com wrote:

Answer to self: py2app - Create standalone Mac OS X applications with Python https://py2app.readthedocs.io/.

Maybe the libmapper README could state "To build standalone application on macOS"?

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