Robust way to ensure other people can run my python program

Question

I wish to place a python program on GitHub and have other people download and run it on their computers with assorted operating systems. I am relatively new to python but have u

Answer 1

There are many, many, many, many, many, many, many ways to do this. I'll skate over the principles behind each, and it's use case.

1. A python environment

There are many ways to do this. pipenv, conda, requirments.txt, etc etc.

With some of these, you can specify python versions. With others, just specify a range of python versions you know it works with - for example, if you're using python 3.7, it's unlikely not to support 3.6; there's only one or two minor changes. 3.8 should work as well.

Another similar method is setup.py. These are generally used to distribute libraries - like PyInstaller (another solution I'll mention below), or numpy, or wxPython, or PyQt5 etc - for import/command line use. The python packaging guide is quite useful, and there are loads of tutorials out there. (google python setup.py tutorial) You can also specify requirements in these files.

2. A container

Docker is the big one. If you haven't heard of it, I'll be surprised. A quick google of a summary comes up with this, which I'll quote part of:

So why does everyone love containers and Docker? James Bottomley, formerly Parallels' CTO of server virtualization and a leading Linux kernel developer, explained VM hypervisors, such as Hyper-V, KVM, and Xen, all are "based on emulating virtual hardware. That means they're fat in terms of system requirements."

Containers, however, use shared operating systems. This means they are much more efficient than hypervisors in system resource terms. Instead of virtualizing hardware, containers rest on top of a single Linux instance. This means you can "leave behind the useless 99.9 percent VM junk, leaving you with a small, neat capsule containing your application,"

That should summarise it for you. (Note you don't need a specific OS for containers.)

3. An executable file

There are 2 main tools that do this at the time of writing. PyInstaller, and cx_Freeze. Both are actively developed. Both are open source.

You take your script, and the tool compiles it to bytecode, finds the imports, copies those, and creates a portable python environment that runs your script on the target system without the end user needing python.

Personally, I prefer PyInstaller - I'm one of the developers. PyInstaller provides all of its functionality through a command line script, and supports most libraries that you can think of - and is extendable to support more. cx_Freeze requires a setup script.

Both tools support windows, Linux, macOS, and more. PyInstaller can create single file exes, or a one folder bundle, whereas cx_Freeze only supports one folder bundles. PyInstaller 3.6 supports python 2.7, and 3.5-3.7 - but 4.0 won't support python 2. cx_Freeze has dropped python 2 support as of the last major release (6.0 I think).

Anyway, enough about the tools features; you can look into those yourself. (See https://pyinstaller.org and https://cx-freeze.readthedocs.io for more info)

When using this distribution method, you usually provide source code on the GitHub repo, a couple of exes (one for each platform) ready for download, and instructions on how to build the code into an executable file.