What cross platform installer to use with pyinstaller?

[zapta]

Thanks for help we got here (thanks!) we were able to have out app (https://pypi.org/project/apio/) working with pyinstaller. This is a command line app with prequent short invocation so we use the 'one folder' model rather than 'one file' and can distribute it as a zip file that users unzip and set PATH to.

My question is, is there a simple installer tool that is cross platform and is known to work well with pyinstaller. E.g. the user loads and run a single executable which when run, creates the pyinstaller app dir and sets the path, on windows, OSX, and linux.

As a side note, this could be a pyinstaller feature, a mode which creates a 'one file' but extracts and run as 'one dir', and includes the aspects of registering the app and uninstalling it when requested.

[bwoodsend]

There's not really any such thing as a cross platform installer tool because there's not really any such thing as a cross platform installation user flow.

• A Windows user expects either a zip file or an executable installer (although MSIX is starting to look like a better alternative since it lets you add things to PATH without modifying PATH).
• A macOS user expects a .app bundle in a .dmg or something installable via homebrew (or a tarball on a really bad day).
• A Linux user probably doesn't want a PyInstaller build at all – they'd much rather use their system package manager – but if you must use PyInstaller for Linux then you'd most likely give them a plain tarball which can be unpacked into /opt and the executable symlinked into /usr/local/bin.

[zapta]

@bwoodsend, I believe that there are on the market cross platform installers, for example https://installbuilder.com. Nothing prevent a cross platform installer to generate a good installation process for each supported platform. For platforms, installer for windows, .dmg for mac, and flagpack for linux seems good choices but probably not the only one.

Since most of your users facing these challenges, it would be great to have a solution from the pyinstaller team, potentially in collaboration with other project teams.

[rokm]

@bwoodsend, I believe that there are on the market cross platform installers, for example https://installbuilder.com/.

So why are you not using one of them?

Nothing prevent a cross platform installer to generate a good installation process for each supported platform. For platforms, installer for windows, .dmg for mac, and flagpack for linux seems good choices but probably not the only one.

Except for the fact that someone needs to develop and maintain it.

Since most of your users facing these challenges, it would be great to have a solution from the pyinstaller team, potentially in collaboration with other project teams.

It probably would be great, except for the people who would now need to maintain both the PyInstaller bits and the cross-installer bits. So as far as I'm concerned, this is out of scope of PyInstaller - we (try to) package all your python (and sometimes also non-python) stuff into stand-alone application, and leave the distribution details (zip archive, platform-specific method, or cross-platform installer) to you. Which means you have complete freedom to use whatever you want, and we don't have to be involved with it in any way.

[zapta]

So why are you not using one of them?

I plan to give https://installbuilder.com a try but since this is for an open source project I prefer to use open source tools.

this is out of scope of PyInstaller

That's a valid answer.

[zapta]

We managed to create iInstallBuilder installers for the pyinstaller generated packages but can't use them for our project because InstallBuilder is not open source.

Anybody knows of a cross platform open source installer that we can use with the pyinstaller generated packages? All that is required is to unzip the file at the appropriate directory, set path to the binary, and handling whatever security and permission requirements the system has.

[bwoodsend]

What does set path to the binary even mean on Linux/macOS? There's no global registry of environment variables – just a cascading, unstandardised hierarchy of shell init files that the desktop will ignore and terminals will conditionally ignore.

[zapta]

The installers I created with InstallBuilder handled it with no problem on windows/osx/linux, I run the installer and the app was in my path. On osx for example, my account is configured to use bash instead of the default zsh and it worked nevertheless. All I had to specify was to include the install dir to the path. InstallBuilder also picked the correct install dirs.

https://github.com/zapta/apio-installers/blob/c750de805c0d8b03ecfef3145c04f8888839bbda/install-builder/apio-project.xml#L27

That's the kind of magic I expect from an installer, similar to the magic that pyinstaller does.

[bwoodsend]

Do you actually know what it's doing though? i.e. Editing the ~/.bashrc or /etc/profile.d?

[zapta]

@bwoodsend, another osx automatic path setting that works is using /etc/paths.d/app where app is the app name in /Applications.

This example is for a pyinstaller app called 'app' that was installed via .pkg as a directory rather than a .app bundle.

$ cat /etc/paths.d/app 
/Applications/app

When I start a new shell I see this path at the end of PATH.

[zapta]

I just checked, it adds this to the bottom of my ~/.bashrc (and possibly to other places?) and doesn't delete it when I delete or uninstall the app.

export PATH="$PATH:/Applications/apio-0.9.6"

[zapta]

We realized that the requirements for using the same installer builder for all three platforms and is over constraint and now using a different one for each of the three platforms, with good results.