Creating executables with cx_Freeze

While source and wheel distributions are useful, they both require that Python and any third-party library dependencies be installed on the system before the program can be run. Often, it would be much handier if we could provide a file or set of files that can simply be copied and run on a system without installing anything else first. Better yet, we'd like to have platform-appropriate installation packages that set up desktop shortcuts and perform other common system configurations.

There are several ways to go about this with Python code, and several projects to choose from; in this book, we're going to look at one called cx_Freeze.

The basic idea of cx_Freeze is to bundle up all the code and shared library files for a Python project along with a Python interpreter, and then generate a small executable file that will launch the code with the bundled interpreter. This approach is commonly known as freezing the code (hence the...