Python does not have any built-in support for building standalone executables. Fortunately, there are some community projects solving that problem with varied amounts of success. The following four are the most notable:
- PyInstaller
- cx_Freeze
- py2exe
- py2app
Each one of them is slightly different in use and also each one of them has slightly different limitations. Before choosing your tool, you need to decide which platform you want to target, because every packaging tool can support only a specific set of operating systems.
It is best if you make such a decision at the very beginning of the project's life. None of these tools, of course, requires deep interaction in your code, but if you start building standalone packages early, you can automate the whole process and save future integration time and costs. If you leave this for later, you may find yourself in a situation where the project is built in such a sophisticated way that none of the available tools will work. Providing a standalone executable for such a project will be problematic and will take a lot of your time.
Let's take a look at PyInstaller in the next section.