breisfeld / pynsist

Build Windows installers for Python applications

Pynsist is a tool to build Windows installers for your Python applications. The installers bundle Python itself, so you can distribute your application to people who don't have Python installed.

Pynsist 2 requires Python 3.5 or above. You can use Pynsist 1.x on Python 2.7 and Python 3.3 or above.

For more information, see the documentation and the examples.

Quickstart

1. Get the tools. Install NSIS, and then install pynsist from PyPI by running pip install pynsist.

2. Write a config file installer.cfg, like this:

   [Application]
   name=My App
   version=1.0
   # How to launch the app - this calls the 'main' function from the 'myapp' package:
   entry_point=myapp:main
   icon=myapp.ico
   
   [Python]
   version=3.6.3
   
   [Include]
   # Packages from PyPI that your application requires, one per line
   # These must have wheels on PyPI:
   pypi_wheels = requests==2.18.4
        beautifulsoup4==4.6.0
        html5lib==0.999999999
   
   # To bundle packages which don't publish wheels, or to include directly wheel files
   # from a directory, see the docs on the config file.
   
   # Other files and folders that should be installed
   files = LICENSE
       data_files/

3. Run pynsist installer.cfg to generate your installer. If pynsist isn't found, you can use python -m nsist installer.cfg instead.

This example illustrates how to use Pynsist by itself, for simple projects. There are other options which can make it easier to integrate as a step in a more complex build process. See the docs for more information.