How to create a shortcut in startmenu using setuptools windows installer

Question

I want to create a start menu or Desktop shortcut for my Python windows installer package. I am trying to follow https://docs.python.org/3.4/distutils/builtdist.html#the-postins

Answer 1

At least with Python 3.6.5, 32bit on Windows, setuptools does work for this. But based on the accepted answer, by trial and error I found some issues that may have caused your script to fail to do what you wanted.

1. create_shortcut does not accept keyword arguments, only positional, so its usage in your code is invalid
2. You must add a .lnk extension for Windows to recognise the shortcut
3. I found sys.executable will be the name of the installer executable, not the python executable
4. As mentioned, you can't see stdout or stderr so you might want to log to a text file. I would suggest also redirecting sys.stdout and sys.stderr to the log file.
5. (Maybe not relevant) as mentioned in this question there appears to be a bug with the version string generated by bdist_wininst. I used the hexediting hack from an answer there to work around this. The location in the answer is not the same, you have to find the -32 yourself.

Full example script:

import sys
import os
import datetime
global datadir
datadir = os.path.join(get_special_folder_path("CSIDL_APPDATA"), "mymodule")
def main(argv):
    if "-install" in argv:
        desktop = get_special_folder_path("CSIDL_DESKTOPDIRECTORY")
        print("Desktop path: %s" % repr(desktop))
        if not os.path.exists(datadir):
            os.makedirs(datadir)
            dir_created(datadir)
            print("Created data directory: %s" % repr(datadir))
        else:
            print("Data directory already existed at %s" % repr(datadir))

        shortcut = os.path.join(desktop, "MyModule.lnk")
        if os.path.exists(shortcut):
            print("Remove existing shortcut at %s" % repr(shortcut))
            os.unlink(shortcut)

        print("Creating shortcut at %s...\n" % shortcut)
        create_shortcut(
            r'C:\Python36\python.exe',
            "MyModuleScript",
            shortcut, 
            "",
            datadir)
        file_created(shortcut)
        print("Successfull!")
    elif "-remove" in sys.argv:
        print("Removing...")
        pass


if __name__ == "__main__":
    logfile = r'C:\mymodule_install.log' # Fallback location
    if os.path.exists(datadir):
        logfile = os.path.join(datadir, "install.log")
    elif os.environ.get("TEMP") and os.path.exists(os.environ.get("TEMP"),""):
        logfile = os.path.join(os.environ.get("TEMP"), "mymodule_install.log")

    with open(logfile, 'a+') as f:
        f.write("Opened\r\n")
        f.write("Ran %s %s at %s" % (sys.executable, " ".join(sys.argv), datetime.datetime.now().isoformat()))
        sys.stdout = f
        sys.stderr = f
        try:
            main(sys.argv)
        except Exception as e:
            raise
        f.close()

    sys.exit(0)