Building the Bootloader

PyInstaller comes with pre-compiled bootloaders for some platforms in the bootloader folder of the distribution folder. When there is no pre-compiled bootloader, the pip setup will attempt to build one.

If there is no precompiled bootloader for your platform, or if you want to modify the bootloader source, you need to build the bootloader. To do this,

  • cd into the distribution folder.
  • cd bootloader.
  • Make the bootloader with: python ./waf distclean all.

This will produce the bootloader executables,

  • ./PyInstaller/bootloader/YOUR_OS/run,
  • ./PyInstaller/bootloader/YOUR_OS/run_d
  • ./PyInstaller/bootloader/YOUR_OS/runw and
  • ./PyInstaller/bootloader/YOUR_OS/runw_d

Note: If you have multiple versions of Python, the Python you use to run waf is the one whose configuration is used.

If this reports an error, read the detailed notes that follow, then ask for technical help.

Development tools

On Debian/Ubuntu systems, you can run the following to install everything required:

sudo apt-get install build-essential

On Fedora/RHEL and derivates, you can run the following:

su
yum groupinstall "Development Tools"

On Mac OS X you can get gcc by installing Xcode. It is a suite of tools for developing software for Mac OS X. It can be also installed from your Mac OS X Install DVD. It is not necessary to install the version 4 of Xcode.

On Solaris and AIX the bootloader is built and tested with gcc.

Building for Windows

On Windows you can use the Visual Studio C++ compiler (Visual Studio 2008 is recommended). A free version you can download is Visual Studio Express.

Note: When compiling libs to link with Python it is important to use the same level of Visual Studio as was used to compile Python. That is not the case here. The bootloader is a self-contained static executable that imposes no restrictions on the version of Python being used. So you can use any Visual Studio version that is convenient.

If Visual Studio is not convenient, you can download and install the MinGW distribution from one of the following locations:

  • MinGW-w64 required, uses gcc 4.4 and up.
  • TDM-GCC - MinGW (not used) and MinGW-w64 installers

On Windows, when using MinGW-w64, add PATH_TO_MINGW\bin to your system PATH. variable. Before building the bootloader run for example:

set PATH=C:\MinGW\bin;%PATH%

Change to the bootloader subdirectory. Run:

python ./waf distclean all

This will produce the bootloader executables run*.exe in the .\PyInstaller\bootloader\YOUR_OS directory.

Building for LINUX

By default, the bootloaders on Linux are LSB binaries.

LSB is a set of open standards that should increase compatibility among Linux distributions. PyInstaller produces a bootloader as an LSB binary in order to increase compatibility for packaged applications among distributions.

Note: LSB version 4.0 is required for successfull building of bootloader.

On Debian- and Ubuntu-based distros, you can install LSB 4.0 tools by adding the following repository to the sources.list file:

deb http://ftp.linux-foundation.org/pub/lsb/repositories/debian lsb-4.0 main

then after having update the apt repository:

sudo apt-get update

you can install LSB 4.0:

sudo apt-get install lsb lsb-build-cc

Most other distributions contain only LSB 3.0 in their software repositories and thus LSB build tools 4.0 must be downloaded by hand. From Linux Foundation download LSB sdk 4.0 for your architecture.

Unpack it by:

tar -xvzf lsb-sdk-4.0.3-1.ia32.tar.gz

To install it run:

cd lsb-sdk
./install.sh

After having installed the LSB tools, you can follow the standard building instructions.

NOTE: if for some reason you want to avoid LSB compilation, you can do so by specifying –no-lsb on the waf command line, as follows:

python waf configure --no-lsb build install

This will also produce support/loader/YOUR_OS/run, support/loader/YOUR_OS/run_d, support/loader/YOUR_OS/runw and support/loader/YOUR_OS/runw_d, but they will not be LSB binaries.