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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-06-07T12:19:26+00:00

I have a simple script that has a dependency on dnspython for parsing zone

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I have a simple script that has a dependency on dnspython for parsing zone files. I would like to distribute this script as a single .py that users can run just so long as they have 2.6/2.7 installed. I don’t want to have the user install dependencies site-wide as there might be conflicts with existing packages/versions, nor do I want them to muck around with virtualenv. I was wondering if there was a way to embed a package like dnspython inside the script (gzip/base64) and have that script access that package at runtime. Perhaps unpack it into a dir in /tmp and add that to sys.path? I’m not concerned about startup overhead, I just want a single .py w/ all dependencies included that I can distribute.

Also, there would be no C dependencies to build, only pure python packages.

Edit: The script doesn’t have to be a .py. Just so long as it is a single executable file.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    You can package multiple Python files up into a .egg. Egg files are essentially just zip archives with well defined metadata – look at the setuptools documentation to see how to do this. Per the docs you can make egg files directly executable by specifying the entry point. This would give you a single executable file that can contain your code + any other dependencies.

    EDIT: Nowadays I would recommend building a pex to do this. pex is basically an executable zip file with non stdlib dependencies. It doesn’t contain a python distribution (like py2app/py2exe) but holds everything else and can be built with a single command line invocation. https://pex.readthedocs.org/en/latest/

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