How to prevent pyinstaller from adding unneccessary and unrelated files?

Question

I was puzzled to see that some files and folders are actually ending up in the pyinstaller generated dist folder. For example, the .git in my project root is ending up as dist/Script/mpl-data/.git together with other files from the root directory. Any idea how to prevent that?

The specfile I am using looks like this:

block_cipher = None


a = Analysis(['..\\scripts\\scipt.py'],
             pathex=['C:\\Users\\..\\scripts'],
             binaries=[],
             datas=[...],
             hiddenimports=['pkg_resources.py2_warn'],  
             hookspath=[],
             runtime_hooks=[],
             excludes=['**/*.git', '**/__cache__', '**/dist', '**/build', '**/InnoSetup'],
             win_no_prefer_redirects=False,
             win_private_assemblies=False,
             cipher=block_cipher,
             noarchive=False)

pyz = PYZ(a.pure, a.zipped_data, cipher=block_cipher)

exe = EXE(pyz,
          a.scripts,
          [],
             
 exclude_binaries=True,
          name='Script',
          debug=False,
          bootloader_ignore_signals=False,
          strip=False,
          upx=True,
          console=True )

coll = COLLECT(exe,
               a.binaries,
               a.zipfiles,
               a.datas,
               strip=False,
               upx=True,
               upx_exclude=[],
               name='Script')

I tried to add the directory names to exclude, but that does not work.

The way I am using pyinstaller is from the root directory of my package.

|-package/__init__.py
|   |...
|-specfiles/pyinstaller_specfile.spec
|-scripts/mainscript.py
|-hooks/...
|-setup.py
|...

And I call

pyinstaller --onedir --noconfirm specfiles\pyinstaller_specfile.spec --additional-hooks-dir=hooks

Did you try searching the PyInstaller documentation - there’s all the details of how to do this there — DisappointedByUnaccountableMod, Sep 23 '21 at 21:21
Try https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4890159/python-excluding-modules-pyinstaller — DisappointedByUnaccountableMod, Sep 23 '21 at 21:33
Yes, that I did first, but the info in the docs did not help. — Soerendip, Sep 23 '21 at 22:51

Soerendip · Answer 1 · 2021-09-24T03:51:59.927

What helped was to change the directory from which I ran the pyinstaller.

Instead of the root directory and calling

pyinstaller --onedir --noconfirm specfiles\pyinstaller_specfile.spec --additional-hooks-dir=hooks

I changed into specfiles and called:

pyinstaller --onedir --noconfirm pyinstaller_specfile.spec --additional-hooks-dir=hooks

This changed the location of the dist folder (into specfiles), but prevented all those unneeded files being imported.

Update: Updating to the latest version of pyinstaller worked even better.

How to prevent pyinstaller from adding unneccessary and unrelated files?

1 Answers1