cx_Freeze - Preventing including unneeded packages
The reason for the not working "excludes" command was that I forgot to include the build options into the setup. After adding the respective line into the code excluding works:
from cx_Freeze import setup, Executable
import sys
# exclude unneeded packages. More could be added. Has to be changed for
# other programs.
build_exe_options = {"excludes": ["tkinter", "PyQt4.QtSql", "sqlite3",
"scipy.lib.lapack.flapack",
"PyQt4.QtNetwork",
"PyQt4.QtScript",
"numpy.core._dotblas",
"PyQt5"],
"optimize": 2}
# Information about the program and build command. Has to be adjusted for
# other programs
setup(
name="MyProgram", # Name of the program
version="0.1", # Version number
description="MyDescription", # Description
options = {"build_exe": build_exe_options}, # <-- the missing line
executables=[Executable("MyProgram.py", # Executable python file
base = ("Win32GUI" if sys.platform == "win32"
else None))],
)
This decreased the program size from 230MB to 120MB. Nevertheless, I did not find a nice way of excluding all unneeded packages. By trial and error (deleting the biggest files in the build folder test-wise) I figured out which classes I can exclude.
I tried whether the matplotlib backends cause the problem and finally figured out that this is not the case. Nontheless, if anybody needs code to exclude all modules of a certain name scheme in a particular folder except some special ones, he may adjust the following to his needs:
mplBackendsPath = os.path.join(os.path.split(sys.executable)[0],
"Lib/site-packages/matplotlib/backends/backend_*")
fileList = glob.glob(mplBackendsPath)
moduleList = []
for mod in fileList:
modules = os.path.splitext(os.path.basename(mod))[0]
if not module == "backend_qt4agg":
moduleList.append("matplotlib.backends." + modules)
build_exe_options = {"excludes": ["tkinter"] + moduleList, "optimize": 2}
I would be happy about more elegant solutions. Further ideas are still welcome. Nevertheless, I regard the problem as solved for me.
I was having a similar problem on a very simple PyQt4 Gui for a small database where the program was 58Mb for a small amount of code, the problem being that the entire PyQt4 folder was being included in the program.
The article here refers to using zip_include_packages in your options to exclude files or to compress them to reduce the file size.
I excluded the entire PyQt4 folder and then included the bits I needed as shown below and it reduced the whole package to 16Mb automatically
options = {
'build_exe': {
'packages':packages,
'zip_include_packages':'PyQt4',
'includes':['PyQt4.QtCore','PyQt4.QtGui','sqlite3','sys','os'],
},
Not sure it is the right way to do it but seems to have no negative impact on my program as of yet