Overview

bbfreeze creates standalone executables from python scripts. It's similar in purpose to the well known py2exe for windows, py2app for OS X, PyInstaller and cx_Freeze (in fact it includes some bits from cx_Freeze and PyInstaller. And it uses the modulegraph package, which is also used by py2app).

It has the following features:

easy installation

bbfreeze can be installed with setuptools' easy_install command.

binary dependency tracking

bbfreeze will track binary dependencies and will include DLLs and shared libraries needed by a frozen program.

multiple script freezing

bbfreeze can freeze multiple scripts at once.

python interpreter included

bbfreeze will create an extra executable named 'py', which might be used like the python executable itself.

bbfreeze works on windows and UNIX-like operating systems. It currently does not work on OS X. bbfreeze has been tested with python 2.4 and 2.5. bbfreeze will not work with python versions prior to 2.3 as it uses the zipimport feature introduced with python 2.3.

bb-freeze - command line tool

bbfreeze provides a command line utility called bb-freeze, which freezes all python scripts given on the command line into the directory dist, which then contains for each script an executable and all dependencies needed by those executables.

Example Usage:

$ cat hello-world.py
#! /usr/bin/env python

import sys
import email

print unicode("hello", "utf8"), unicode("world!", "ascii")

print "sys.path:", sys.path
print "__file__:", __file__
print "__name__:", __name__

print "locals():", locals()

print "sys.argv", sys.argv
print "sys.executable:", sys.executable
$ bb-freeze hello-world.py
*** applied <function recipe_email at 0xb7ba702c>
$ dist/hello-world
hello world!
...
$ dist/py
Python 2.5.1c1 (r251c1:54692, Apr 11 2007, 01:40:50)
[GCC 4.1.2 20061115 (prerelease) (Debian 4.1.1-21)] on linux2
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
(MyConsole)
>>> import email
$

bbfreeze - API

The following code shows how to freeze scripts using the bbfreeze API:

from bbfreeze import Freezer
f = Freezer("hello-world-1.0", includes=("_strptime"))
f.addScript("hello-world.py")
f.addScript("hello-version.py")
f()    # starts the freezing process

ChangeLog