Py2App Placing PIL Dylibs in Zip file

Question

I have an python application that uses the Python Imaging Library (PIL) and is packaged using Py2app. Numpy dylibs are found in the app contents directory:

demo.         


        

Answer 1

py2app implements special handling of certain packages via a mechanism called "recipes". It comes with built-in recipes for certain packages including numpy, which is why numpy is excluded from the .zip file. (Here's the built-in numpy recipe.)

In addition to the built-in recipes, you can define your own recipes for py2app to use. Just define a class that has a check method, and monkey-patch it as an attribute onto py2app.recipes:

# In setup.py

class PIL_recipe:
    def check(self, cmd, mf):
        m = mf.findNode("PIL")
        if m is None or m.filename is None:
            return None

        # Exclude from site-packages.zip
        return {"packages": ["PIL"]}

py2app.recipes.PIL = PIL_recipe()

...

setup(...)

If you need to do this with several libraries, you can generalize this trick so that it doesn't hard-code the name of the package:

class ExcludeFromZip_Recipe(object):
    def __init__(self, module):
        self.module = module

    def check(self, cmd, mf):
        m = mf.findNode(self.module)
        if m is None:
            return None

        # Don't put the module in the site-packages.zip file
        return {"packages": [self.module]}

for module in ['PIL', 'skimage', 'sklearn', 'jsonschema']:
    setattr( py2app.recipes, module, ExcludeFromZip_Recipe(module) )

Disclaimer: This is how I've solved this problem in the past. But I'm not sure why your zip file is named python3.zip instead of site-packages.zip.