How do I package/distribute a Python 2.7 application with selenium?

Question

I am fairly new to Python and I have developed a program that has a Tkinter GUI and uses selenium WebDriver to scrape information. I need to find a way to package all of this so that it can be used on other computers. I call three extra modules (selenium, openpyxl, BeautifulSoup) in my script. Is there a way to make this an executable file? Or will they have to call it through their command window? I have heard of a program called Advanced Installer, would this do what i want?

Thank you

I realize that my question is very broad, i just don't know where to begin. This application is only applicable to people within my company, so i don't want it to be available to others. I just want to be able to move all the necessary files to another computer and they can just click one button and go.

Answer 1

I encourage you to read how to package a python application. Typically what you want to do is release your application on the Python Packaging Index, so that your app is available as a Python module for other developers and users. Once you release your app on PyPI, you can go ahead and provide users with further options like easy install.

Note that releasing your app and making it available to the world is something that you'd certainly want to do.

The best way to package your application is by using distutils.

Since packaging a python app is a considerably broad topic, I won't be able to cover it in entirety here. However, here are a few guides to get you started:

• Hitchhiker’s Guide to Packaging
• Distributing Python modules
• Guide to open-sourcing a python project

Finally, a good practice is to look at existing open-source Python projects and look at the way their setup script and the MANIFEST.in file is written. For doing that, you would need to understand the way the project is structured, which is important in realizing the correct way to package an application.

Hope this helps. All the best!