pynsist 2.8

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.

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
    
    # Other files and folders that should be installed
    files = LICENSE
        data_files/
    

    See The Config File for more details about this, including how to bundle packages which don’t publish wheels.

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

Contents

See also the examples folder in the repository.

The API is not yet documented here, because I’m still working out how it should be structured. The functions and classes have docstrings, and you’re welcome to use them directly, though they may change in the future.

Indices and tables