Question

I am using python 2.6 on XP. I have just installed py2exe, and I can successfully create a simple hello.exe from a hello.py. However, when I try using py2exe on my real program, py2exe produces a few information messages but fails to generate anything in the dist folder.

My setup.py looks like this:

from distutils.core import setup import py2exe  setup(console=['ServerManager.py']) 

and the py2exe output looks like this:

python setup.py py2exe running py2exe creating C:\DevSource\Scripts\ServerManager\build creating C:\DevSource\Scripts\ServerManager\build\bdist.win32    ...    ... creating C:\DevSource\Scripts\ServerManager\dist *** searching for required modules *** *** parsing results *** creating python loader for extension 'wx._misc_' (C:\Python26\lib\site-packages\wx-2.8-msw-unicode\wx\_misc_.pyd -> wx._misc_.pyd) creating python loader for extension 'lxml.etree' (C:\Python26\lib\site-packages\lxml\etree.pyd -> lxml.etree.pyd)    ...    ... creating python loader for extension 'bz2' (C:\Python26\DLLs\bz2.pyd -> bz2.pyd) *** finding dlls needed *** 

py2exe seems to have found all my imports (though I was a bit surprised to see win32 mentioned, as I am not explicitly importing it). Also, my program starts up quite happily with this command:

python ServerManager.py 

Clearly I am doing something fundamentally wrong, but in the absence of any error messages from py2exe I have no idea what.

Answer 1

I’ve discovered that py2exe works just fine if I comment out the part of my program that uses wxPython. Also, when I use py2exe on the ‘simple’ sample that comes with its download (i.e. in Python26\Lib\site-packages\py2exe\samples\simple), I get this error message:

*** finding dlls needed *** error: MSVCP90.dll: No such file or directory 

So something about wxPython makes py2exe think I need a Visual Studio 2008 DLL. I don’t have VS2008, and yet my program works perfectly well as a directory of Python modules. I found a copy of MSVCP90.DLL on the web, installed it in Python26/DLLs, and py2exe now works fine.

I still don’t understand where this dependency has come from, since I can run my code perfectly okay without py2exe. It’s also annoying that py2exe didn’t give me an error message like it did with the test_wx.py sample.

Further update: When I tried to run the output from py2exe on another PC, I discovered that it needed to have MSVCR90.DLL installed; so if your target PC hasn’t got Visual C++ 2008 already installed, I recommend you download and install the Microsoft Visual C++ 2008 Redistributable Package.