If you are:

  • Developing a Python desktop app
  • Using Pyinstaller to budle your app into a single executable file
  • Managing your environment and packages with poetry

and you want to have a single one-liner (poetry run build) to trigger the build process…

✨ Then I can help you! ✨

Backstory

I was myself looking for a similar solution when I found this very pertinent StackOverfow question. In there I found some insipiration that led me to do some digging, that led me to figure out the solution! Trying to be a good citizen, I posted it as a reply, and trying to be an even better one, I took the time to format it nicely.

So nicely in fact that I’ve decided to include it here, for whoever might need it.

One-liner poetry command to trigger the build process of your app

As you may know already, Poetry will only let you run ‘scripts’ if they are functions inside your package. Just like in your pyproject.toml, you can map the start command to main:start, which is the start() function of your main.py module.

Similarly, you can create a function in a module that triggers Pyinstaller and map that to a command that you can run as poetry run <command>.

Assuming you have a module structure like this:

my_package
├── my_package
│   ├── __init__.py
│   ├── pyinstaller.py
│   └── main.py
└── pyproject.toml
  1. Create a file pyinstaller.py to call the Pyinstaller API

The file should be inside your package structure, as shown in the diagram above. This is adapted from the Pyinstaller docs

import PyInstaller.__main__
from pathlib import Path

HERE = Path(__file__).parent.absolute()
path_to_main = str(HERE / "main.py")

def install():
    PyInstaller.__main__.run([
        path_to_main,
        '--onefile',
        '--windowed',
        # other pyinstaller options... 
    ])
  1. Map the build command in pyproject.toml

In the pyproject.toml file, add this

[tool.poetry.scripts]
build = "my_package.pyinstaller:install"
  1. From the terminal, invoke the build command

You must do so under the virtual environment that poetry creates:

poetry run build

🎉 Profit