Project History

Work on PyOxidizer started in November 2018 by Gregory Szorc.

Blog Posts

Version History

0.3.0

Released on August 16, 2019.

Backwards Compatibility Notes

  • The pyembed::PythonConfig struct now has an additional extra_extension_modules field.

  • The default musl Python distribution now uses LibreSSL instead of OpenSSL. This should hopefully be an invisible change.

  • Default Python distributions now use CPython 3.7.4 instead of 3.7.3.

  • Applications are now built into directories named apps/<app_name>/<target>/<build_type> rather than apps/<app_name>/<build_type>. This enables builds for multiple targets to coexist in an application’s output directory.

  • The program_name field from the [[embedded_python_config]] config section has been removed. At run-time, the current executable’s path is always used when calling Py_SetProgramName().

  • The format of embedded Python module data has changed. The pyembed crate and pyoxidizer versions must match exactly or else the pyembed crate will likely crash at run-time when parsing module data.

Bug Fixes

  • The libedit extension variant for the readline extension should now link on Linux. Before, attempting to link a binary using this extension variant would result in missing symbol errors.

  • The setup-py-install [[packaging_rule]] now performs actions to appease setuptools, thus allowing installation of packages using setuptools to (hopefully) work without issue (#70).

  • The virtualenv [[packaging_rule]] now properly finds the site-packages directory on Windows (#83).

  • The filter-include [[packaging_rule]] no longer requires both files and glob_files be defined (#88).

  • import ctypes now works on Windows (#61).

  • The in-memory module importer now implements get_resource_reader() instead of get_resource_loader(). (The CPython documentation steered us in the wrong direction - https://bugs.python.org/issue37459.)

  • The in-memory module importer now correctly populates __package__ in more cases than it did previously. Before, whether a module was a package was derived from the presence of a foo.bar module. Now, a module will be identified as a package if the file providing it is named __init__. This more closely matches the behavior of Python’s filesystem based importer. (#53)

New Features

  • The default Python distributions have been updated. Archives are generally about half the size from before. Tcl/tk is included in the Linux and macOS distributions (but PyOxidizer doesn’t yet package the Tcl files).

  • Extra extension modules can now be registered with PythonConfig instances. This can be useful for having the application embedding Python provide its own extension modules without having to go through Python build mechanisms to integrate those extension modules into the Python executable parts.

  • Built applications now have the ability to detect and use terminfo databases on the execution machine. This allows applications to interact with terminals properly. (e.g. the backspace key will now work in interactive pdb sessions). By default, applications on non-Windows platforms will look for terminfo databases at well-known locations and attempt to load them.

  • Default Python distributions now use CPython 3.7.4 instead of 3.7.3.

  • A warning is now emitted when a Python source file contains __file__. This should help trace down modules using __file__.

  • Added 32-bit Windows distribution.

  • New pyoxidizer distribution command for producing distributable artifacts of applications. Currently supports building tar archives and .msi and .exe installers using the WiX Toolset.

  • Libraries required by C extensions are now passed into the linker as library dependencies. This should allow C extensions linked against libraries to be embedded into produced executables.

  • pyoxidizer --verbose will now pass verbose to invoked pip and setup.py scripts. This can help debug what Python packaging tools are doing.

All Other Relevant Changes

  • The list of modules being added by the Python standard library is no longer printed during rule execution unless --verbose is used. The output was excessive and usually not very informative.

0.2.0

Released on June 30, 2019.

Backwards Compatibility Notes

  • Applications are now built into an apps/<appname>/(debug|release) directory instead of apps/<appname>. This allows debug and release builds to exist side-by-side.

Bug Fixes

  • Extracted .egg directories in Python package directories should now have their resources detected properly and not as Python packages with the name *.egg.

  • site-packages directories are now recognized as Python resource package roots and no longer have their contents packaged under a site-packages Python package.

New Features

  • Support for building and embedding C extensions on Windows, Linux, and macOS in many circumstances. See Native Extension Modules for support status.

  • pyoxidizer init now accepts a --pip-install option to pre-configure generated pyoxidizer.toml files with packages to install via pip. Combined with the --python-code option, it is now possible to create pyoxidizer.toml files for a ready-to-use Python application!

  • pyoxidizer now accepts a --verbose flag to make operations more verbose. Various low-level output is no longer printed by default and requires --verbose to see.

All Other Relevant Changes

  • Packaging now automatically creates empty modules for missing parent packages. This prevents a module from being packaged without its parent. This could occur with namespace packages, for example.

  • pip-install-simple rule now passes --no-binary :all: to pip.

  • Cargo packages updated to latest versions.

0.1.3

Released on June 29, 2019.

Bug Fixes

  • Fix Python refcounting bug involving call to PyImport_AddModule() when mode = module evaluation mode is used. The bug would likely lead to a segfault when destroying the Python interpreter. (#31)

  • Various functionality will no longer fail when running pyoxidizer from a Git repository that isn’t the canonical PyOxidizer repository. (#34)

New Features

  • pyoxidizer init now accepts a --python-code option to control which Python code is evaluated in the produced executable. This can be used to create applications that do not run a Python REPL by default.

  • pip-install-simple packaging rule now supports excludes for excluding resources from packaging. (#21)

  • pip-install-simple packaging rule now supports extra_args for adding parameters to the pip install command. (#42)

All Relevant Changes

  • Minimum Rust version decreased to 1.31 (the first Rust 2018 release). (#24)

  • Added CI powered by Azure Pipelines. (#45)

  • Comments in auto-generated pyoxidizer.toml have been tweaked to improve understanding. (#29)

0.1.2

Released on June 25, 2019.

Bug Fixes

  • Honor HTTP_PROXY and HTTPS_PROXY environment variables when downloading Python distributions. (#15)

  • Handle BOM when compiling Python source files to bytecode. (#13)

All Relevant Changes

  • pyoxidizer now verifies the minimum Rust version meets requirements before building.

0.1.1

Released on June 24, 2019.

Bug Fixes

  • pyoxidizer binaries built from crates should now properly refer to an appropriate commit/tag in PyOxidizer’s canonical Git repository in auto-generated Cargo.toml files. (#11)

0.1

Released on June 24, 2019. This is the initial formal release of PyOxidizer. The first pyoxidizer crate was published to crates.io.

New Features

  • Support for building standalone, single file executables embedding Python for 64-bit Windows, macOS, and Linux.

  • Support for importing Python modules from memory using zero-copy.

  • Basic Python packaging support.

  • Support for jemalloc as Python’s memory allocator.

  • pyoxidizer CLI command with basic support for managing project lifecycle.