finally{}

Written on April 10, 2008 – 9:16 pm | by Joseph Jude |

I have been trying to package django application as a windows executable. I know it might sound ridiculous to most of the web-apps developers. Most of Windows users are not used to ’svn’ a source. Add to it that Python is not a default installation in any of windows installation. So it would be better, if I could make a self-contained executable version. This will be useful for demo purposes. If I can make this work, I can even create desktop applications on Django. How cool that would be!

I might be doing something really stupid, because there are at least three utilities available for this purpose.

First, I tried, dbuilder.py, which try to package django apps. There I got the below error.

Unknown command: 'runserver'
Type 'manage.pyc help' for usage. 

When I asked around in irc, I was told that it will not work. Nothing can be done.

Then I tried cx_freeze. I couldn’t find much of documentation for cx_freeze. Yea, I can make a hello.py as an executable. That is easy but including some packages and other stuff is difficult. By searching around, I finally wrote a script that compiled. But when I executed the output, I got the below error:

WindowsError: [Error 3] The system cannot find the path specified: ‘C:\Documents and Settings\Joseph\Desktop\SOL\sol.exe\django\db\backends/*.*’

Being a Python newbie, probably I am expecting too much of myself! But after 5 evening of reading and trying, I am frustrated now. I know there is py2exe and pyinstaller. But I am not sure if I can figure out to make them work. So I’m going to shut down now with lots of frustration.