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I have found PyInstaller [1] to work well for packaging everything into a single ZIP file that unzips to a folder with an executable binary and all accompanying files (or even a single EXE file that self-extracts when run, but that increases startup time). It knows how to package PyQt and its associated Qt libraries (or PySide, which I actually prefer) so that they can be shipped with your application.

[1 https://pyinstaller.org/en/stable/

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Yeah, PyInstaller is the best thing out there if you need to bundle a complex Python app into an executable, with cx_Freeze not far behind.

But it's still considered challenging when you compare with any other compiled language, where you can get an executable out of the box. I ship Python desktop apps at work and it's remarkable how much code we accumulated over the years just to deal with the "interpreter in bundled/exe mode".

Check out (my) https://build-system.fman.io.

PyInstaller always seems to tick off our org's MalwareBytes, causing it to break in new and interesting ways but only after a good amount of development hours have been sunk into the project. Recently I've been using Nuitka to package python apps. It would be nice if PSF would adopt/develop an official way to do this.

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