creating standalone exe using pyinstaller with mayavi import

Question

I have a program that helps visualize some data in 3D by plotting a surface and a cloud of points to see how they relate to the surface. For the visualization I am using may

Answer 1

I dealt with the same problem and finally switched to cx_freeze, which now works fine on linux and windows. The problems you are dealing with arise from statements like in the SE answer, you found, i.e. dynamic import statements, where what is imported is only determined at runtime:

    be = 'pyface.ui.%s.' % tk
    __import__(be + 'init')

I couldn't fix that in pyinstaller, while in cx_freeze it works, when you explicitely add the required packages in the build file. Here is the package list I used:

"packages": ["pyface.ui.qt4", "tvtk.vtk_module", "tvtk.pyface.ui.wx", "matplotlib.backends.backend_qt4",'pkg_resources._vendor','pkg_resources.extern','pygments.lexers',
                              'tvtk.pyface.ui.qt4','pyface.qt','pyface.qt.QtGui','pyface.qt.QtCore','numpy','matplotlib','mayavi']

Here is a full build script that works with python3.6, cx_freeze 5.0.2, mayavi 4.5.0+vtk71, traits 4.6.0, pyface 5.1.0 and traitsui 5.1.0.

import os
from cx_Freeze import setup, Executable
import cx_Freeze.hooks
def hack(finder, module):
    return
cx_Freeze.hooks.load_matplotlib = hack
import scipy
import matplotlib

scipy_path = os.path.dirname(scipy.__file__) #use this if you are also using scipy in your application

build_exe_options = {"packages": ["pyface.ui.qt4", "tvtk.vtk_module", "tvtk.pyface.ui.wx", "matplotlib.backends.backend_qt4",'pygments.lexers',
                                  'tvtk.pyface.ui.qt4','pyface.qt','pyface.qt.QtGui','pyface.qt.QtCore','numpy','matplotlib','mayavi'],
                     "include_files": [(str(scipy_path), "scipy"), #for scipy
                    (matplotlib.get_data_path(), "mpl-data"),],
                     "includes":['PyQt4.QtCore','PyQt4.QtGui','mayavi','PyQt4'],
                     'excludes':'Tkinter',
                    "namespace_packages": ['mayavi']
                    }


executables = [
    Executable('main.py', targetName="main.exe",base = 'Win32GUI',)
]

setup(name='main',
      version='1.0',
      description='',
      options = {"build_exe": build_exe_options},
      executables=executables,
      )

I import pyface in the following way:

os.environ['ETS_TOOLKIT'] = 'qt4'

import imp
try:
    imp.find_module('PySide') # test if PySide if available
except ImportError:
    os.environ['QT_API'] = 'pyqt' # signal to pyface that PyQt4 should be used

from pyface.qt import QtGui, QtCore

before importing mayavi