Changelog for PyInstaller

4.5 (2021-08-01)

Features

  • (POSIX) Add exclude_system_libraries function to the Analysis class for .spec files, to exclude most or all non-Python system libraries from the bundle. Documented in new POSIX Specific Options section. (#6022)

Bugfix

  • (Cygwin) Add _MEIPASS to DLL search path to fix loading of python shared library in onefile builds made in cygwin environment and executed outside of it. (#6000)

  • (Linux) Display missing library warnings for “not found” lines in ldd output (i.e., libsomething.so => not found) instead of quietly ignoring them. (#6015)

  • (Linux) Fix spurious missing library warning when libc.so points to ldd. (#6015)

  • (macOS) Fix python shared library detection for non-framework python builds when the library path cannot be inferred from imports of the python executable. (#6021)

  • (macOS) Fix the crashes in onedir bundles of tkinter-based applications created using Homebrew python 3.9 and Tcl/Tk 8.6.11. (#6043)

  • (macOS) When fixing executable for codesigning, update the value of vmsize field in the __LINKEDIT segment. (#6039)

  • Downgrade messages about missing dynamic link libraries from ERROR to WARNING. (#6015)

  • Fix a bytecode parsing bug which caused tuple index errors whilst scanning modules which use ctypes. (#6007)

  • Fix an error when rhtooks for pkgutil and pkg_resources are used together. (#6018)

  • Fix architecture detection on Apple M1 (#6029)

  • Fix crash in windowed bootloader when the traceback for unhandled exception cannot be retrieved. (#6070)

  • Improve handling of errors when loading hook entry-points. (#6028)

  • Suppress missing library warning for shiboken2 (PySide2) and shiboken6 (PySide6) shared library. (#6015)

Incompatible Changes

  • (macOS) Disable processing of Apple events for the purpose of argv emulation in onedir application bundles. This functionality was introduced in |PyInstaller| 4.4 by (#5920) in response to feature requests (#5436) and (#5908), but was discovered to be breaking tkinter-based onedir bundles made with Homebrew python 3.9 and Tcl/Tk 8.6.11 (#6043). As such, until the cause is investigated and the issue addressed, this feature is reverted/disabled. (#6048)

Hooks

  • Add a hook for pandas.io.formats.style to deal with indirect import of jinja2 and the missing template file. (#6010)

  • Simplify the PySide2.QWebEngineWidgets and PyQt5.QWebEngineWidgets by merging most of their code into a common helper function. (#6020)

Documentation

  • Add a page describing hook configuration mechanism and the currently implemented options. (#6025)

PyInstaller Core

  • Isolate discovery of 3rd-party hook directories into a separate subprocess to avoid importing packages in the main process. (#6032)

Bootloader build

  • Allow statically linking zlib on non-Windows specified via either a --static-zlib flag or a PYI_STATIC_ZLIB=1 environment variable. (#6010)

4.4 (2021-07-13)

Features

  • (macOS) Implement signing of .app bundle (ad-hoc or with actual signing identity, if provided). (#5581)

  • (macOS) Implement support for Apple Silicon M1 (arm64) platform and different targets for frozen applications (thin-binary x86_64, thin-binary arm64, and fat-binary universal2), with build-time arch validation and ad-hoc resigning of all collected binaries. (#5581)

  • (macOS) In onedir windowed (.app bundle) mode, perform an interation of Apple event processing to convert odoc and GURL events to sys.argv before entering frozen python script. (#5920)

  • (macOS) In windowed (.app bundle) mode, always log unhandled exception information to syslog, regardless of debug mode. (#5890)

  • (Windows) Add support for Python from Microsoft App Store. (#5816)

  • (Windows) Implement a custom dialog for displaying information about unhandled exception and its traceback when running in windowed/noconsole mode. (#5890)

  • Add recursive option to PyInstaller.utils.hooks.copy_metadata(). (#5830)

  • Add --codesign-identity command-line switch to perform code-signing with actual signing identity instead of ad-hoc signing (macOS only). (#5581)

  • Add --osx-entitlements-file command-line switch that specifies optional entitlements file to be used during code signing of collected binaries (macOS only). (#5581)

  • Add --target-arch command-line switch to select target architecture for frozen application (macOS only). (#5581)

  • Add a splash screen that displays a background image and text: The splash screen can be controlled from within Python using the pyi_splash module. A splash screen can be added using the --splash IMAGE_FILE option. If optional text is enabled, the splash screen will show the progress of unpacking in onefile mode. This feature is supported only on Windows and Linux. A huge thanks to @Chrisg2000 for programming this feature. (#4354, #4887)

  • Add hooks for PyQt6. (#5865)

  • Add hooks for PySide6. (#5865)

  • Add option to opt-out from reporting full traceback for unhandled exceptions in windowed mode (Windows and macOS only), via --disable-windowed-traceback PyInstaller CLI switch and the corresponding disable_windowed_traceback boolean argument to EXE() in spec file. (#5890)

  • Allow specify which icon set, themes and locales to pack with Gtk applications. Pass a keyword arg hooksconfig to Analysis.

    a = Analysis(["my-gtk-app.py"],
                 ...,
                 hooksconfig={
                     "gi": {
                         "icons": ["Adwaita"],
                         "themes": ["Adwaita"],
                         "languages": ["en_GB", "zh_CN"]
                     }
                 },
                 ...)
    

    (#5853)

  • Automatically exclude Qt plugins from UPX processing. (#4178)

  • Collect distribution metadata automatically. This works by scanning collected Python files for uses of:

    • pkg_resources.get_distribution()

    • pkg_resources.require()

    • importlib.metadata.distribution()

    • importlib.metadata.metadata()

    • importlib.metadata.files()

    • importlib.metadata.version()

    In all cases, the metadata will only be collected if the distribution name is given as a plain string literal. Anything more complex will still require a hook containing PyInstaller.utils.hooks.copy_metadata(). (#5830)

  • Implement support for pkgutil.iter_modules(). (#1905)

  • Windows: Provide a meaningful error message if given an icon in an unsupported Image format. (#5755)

Bugfix

  • (macOS) App bundles built in onedir mode now filter out -psnxxx command-line argument from sys.argv, to keep behavior consistent with bundles built in onefile mode. (#5920)

  • (macOS) Ensure that the macOS SDK version reported by the frozen application corresponds to the minimum of the SDK version used to build the bootloader and the SDK version used to build the Python library. Having the application report more recent version than Python library and other bundled libraries may result in macOS attempting to enable additional features that are not available in the Python library, which may in turn cause inconsistent behavior and UI issues with tkinter. (#5839)

  • (macOS) Remove spurious MacOS/ prefix from CFBundleExecutable property in the generated Info.plist when building an app bundle. (#4413, #5442)

  • (macOS) The drag & drop file paths passed to app bundles built in onedir mode are now reflected in sys.argv. (#5436)

  • (macOS) The file paths passed from the UI (Open with…) to app bundles built in onedir mode are now reflected in sys.argv. (#5908)

  • (macOS) Work around the tkinter UI issues due to problems with dark mode activation: black Tk window with macOS Intel installers from python.org, or white text on bright background with Anaconda python. (#5827)

  • (Windows) Enable collection of additional VC runtime DLLs (msvcp140.dll, msvcp140_1.dll, msvcp140_2.dll, and vcruntime140_1.dll), to allow frozen applications to run on Windows systems that do not have Visual Studio 2015/2017/2019 Redistributable installed. (#5770)

  • Enable retrieval of code object for __main__ module via its associated loader (i.e., FrozenImporter). (#5897)

  • Fix inspect.getmodule() failing to resolve module from stack-frame obtained via inspect.stack(). (#5963)

  • Fix __main__ module being recognized as built-in instead of module. (#5897)

  • Fix a bug in ctypes dependency scanning which caused references to be missed if the preceding code contains more than 256 names or 256 literals. (#5830)

  • Fix collection of duplicated _struct and zlib extension modules with mangled filenames. (#5851)

  • Fix python library lookup when building with RH SCL python 3.8 or later. (#5749)

  • Prevent PyInstaller.utils.hooks.copy_metadata() from renaming [...].dist-info metadata folders to [...].egg-info which breaks usage of pkg_resources.requires() with extras. (#5774)

  • Prevent a bootloader executable without an embedded CArchive from being misidentified as having one, which leads to undefined behavior in frozen applications with side-loaded CArchive packages. (#5762)

  • Prevent the use of sys or os as variables in the global namespace in frozen script from affecting the ctypes hooks thar are installed during bootstrap. (#5797)

  • Windows: Fix EXE being rebuilt when there are no changes. (#5921)

Hooks

    • Add PostGraphAPI.analysis attribute. Hooks can access the Analysis object through the hook() function.

    • Hooks may access a Analysis.hooksconfig attribute assigned on Analysis construction.

      A helper function get_hook_config() was defined in utils.hooks to get the config. (#5853)

  • Add support for PyQt5 5.15.4. (#5631)

  • Do not exclude setuptools.py27compat and setuptools.py33compat as they are required by other setuptools modules. (#5979)

  • Switch the library search order in ctypes hooks: first check whether the given name exists as-is, before trying to search for its basename in sys._MEIPASS (instead of the other way around). (#5907)

Bootloader

  • (macOS) Build bootloader as universal2 binary by default (can be disabled by passing --no-universal2 to waf). (#5581)

  • Add Tcl/Tk based Splash screen, which is controlled from within Python. The necessary module to create the Splash screen in PyInstaller is under Splash available. A huge thanks to @Chrisg2000 for programming this feature. (#4887)

  • Provide a Dockerfile to build Linux bootloaders for different architectures. (#5995)

Documentation

  • Document the new macOS multi-arch support and code-signing behavior in corresponding sub-sections of Notes about specific Features. (#5581)

Bootloader build

  • Update clang in linux64 Vagrant VM to clang-11 from apt.llvm.org so it can build universal2 macOS bootloader. (#5581)

  • Update crossosx Vagrant VM to build the toolchain from Command Line Tools for Xcode instead of full Xcode package. (#5581)

4.3 (2021-04-16)

Features

  • Provide basic implementation for FrozenImporter.get_source() that allows reading source from .py files that are collected by hooks as data files. (#5697)

  • Raise the maximum allowed size of CArchive (and consequently onefile executables) from 2 GiB to 4 GiB. (#3939)

  • The unbuffered stdio mode (the u option) now sets the Py_UnbufferedStdioFlag flag to enable unbuffered stdio mode in Python library. (#1441)

  • Windows: Set EXE checksums. Reduces false-positive detection from antiviral software. (#5579)

  • Add new command-line options that map to collect functions from hookutils: --collect-submodules, --collect-data, --collect-binaries, --collect-all, and --copy-metadata. (#5391)

  • Add new hook utility collect_entry_point() for collecting plugins defined through setuptools entry points. (#5734)

Bugfix

  • (macOS) Fix Bad CPU type in executable error in helper-spawned python processes when running under arm64-only flavor of Python on Apple M1. (#5640)

  • (OSX) Suppress missing library error messages for system libraries as those are never collected by PyInstaller and starting with Big Sur, they are hidden by the OS. (#5107)

  • (Windows) Change default cache directory to LOCALAPPDATA (from the original APPDATA). This is to make sure that cached data doesn’t get synced with the roaming profile. For this and future versions AppData\Roaming\pyinstaller might be safely deleted. (#5537)

  • (Windows) Fix onefile builds not having manifest embedded when icon is disabled via --icon NONE. (#5625)

  • (Windows) Fix the frozen program crashing immediately with Failed to execute script pyiboot01_bootstrap message when built in noconsole mode and with import logging enabled (either via --debug imports or --debug all command-line switch). (#4213)

  • CArchiveReader now performs full back-to-front file search for MAGIC, allowing pyi-archive_viewer to open binaries with extra appended data after embedded package (e.g., digital signature). (#2372)

  • Fix MERGE() to properly set references to nested resources with their full shared-package-relative path instead of just basename. (#5606)

  • Fix onefile builds failing to extract files when the full target path exceeds 260 characters. (#5617)

  • Fix a crash in pyi-archive_viewer when quitting the application or moving up a level. (#5554)

  • Fix extraction of nested files in onefile builds created in MSYS environments. (#5569)

  • Fix installation issues stemming from unicode characters in file paths. (#5678)

  • Fix the build-time error under python 3.7 and earlier when ctypes is manually added to hiddenimports. (#3825)

  • Fix the return code if the frozen script fails due to unhandled exception. The return code 1 is used instead of -1, to keep the behavior consistent with that of the python interpreter. (#5480)

  • Linux: Fix binary dependency scanner to support changes to ldconfig introduced in glibc 2.33. (#5540)

  • Prevent MERGE (multipackage) from creating self-references for duplicated TOC entries. (#5652)

  • PyInstaller-frozen onefile programs are now compatible with staticx even if the bootloader is built as position-independent executable (PIE). (#5330)

  • Remove dependence on a private function removed in matplotlib 3.4.0rc1. (#5568)

  • Strip absolute paths from .pyc modules collected into base_library.zip to enable reproducible builds that are invariant to Python install location. (#5563)

  • (OSX) Fix issues with pycryptodomex on macOS. (#5583)

  • Allow compiled modules to be collected into base_library.zip. (#5730)

  • Fix a build error triggered by scanning ctypes.CDLL('libc.so') on certain Linux C compiler combinations. (#5734)

  • Improve performance and reduce stack usage of module scanning. (#5698)

Hooks

  • Add support for Conda Forge’s distribution of NumPy. (#5168)

  • Add support for package content listing via pkg_resources. The implementation enables querying/listing resources in a frozen package (both PYZ-embedded and on-filesystem, in that order of precedence) via pkg_resources.resource_exists(), resource_isdir(), and resource_listdir(). (#5284)

  • Hooks: Import correct typelib for GtkosxApplication. (#5475)

  • Prevent matplotlib hook from collecting current working directory when it fails to determine the path to matplotlib’s data directory. (#5629)

  • Update pandas hook for compatibility with version 1.2.0 and later. (#5630)

  • Update hook for distutils.sysconfig to be compatible with pyenv-virtualenv. (#5218)

  • Update hook for sqlalchemy to support version 1.4.0 and above. (#5679)

  • Update hook for sysconfig to be compatible with pyenv-virtualenv. (#5018)

Bootloader

  • Implement full back-to-front file search for the embedded archive. (#5511)

  • Perform file extraction from the embedded archive in a streaming manner in order to limit memory footprint when archive contains large files. (#5551)

  • Set the __file__ attribute in the __main__ module (entry-point script) to the absolute file name inside the _MEIPASS. (#5649)

  • Enable cross compiling for FreeBSD from Linux. (#5733)

Documentation

  • Doc: Add version spec file option for macOS Bundle. (#5476)

  • Update the Run-time Information section to reflect the changes in behavior of __file__ inside the __main__ module. (#5649)

PyInstaller Core

  • Drop support for python 3.5; EOL since September 2020. (#5439)

  • Collect python extension modules that correspond to built-ins into lib-dynload sub-directory instead of directly into bundle’s root directory. This prevents them from shadowing shared libraries with the same basename that are located in a package and loaded via ctypes or cffi, and also declutters the bundle’s root directory. (#5604)

Breaking

  • No longer collect pyconfig.h and makefile for sysconfig. Instead of get_config_h_filename() and get_makefile_filename(), you should use get_config_vars() which no longer depends on those files. (#5218)

  • The __file__ attribute in the __main__ module (entry-point script) is now set to the absolute file name inside the _MEIPASS (as if script file existed there) instead of just script filename. This better matches the behavior of __file__ in the unfrozen script, but might break the existing code that explicitly relies on the old frozen behavior. (#5649)

4.2 (2021-01-13)

Features

  • Add hooks utilities to find binary dependencies of Anaconda distributions. (#5213)

  • (OSX) Automatically remove the signature from the collected copy of the Python shared library, using codesign --remove-signature. This accommodates both onedir and onefile builds with recent python versions for macOS, where invalidated signature on PyInstaller-collected copy of the Python library prevents the latter from being loaded. (#5451)

  • (Windows) PyInstaller’s console or windowed icon is now added at freeze-time and no longer built into the bootloader. Also, using --icon=NONE allows to not apply any icon, thereby making the OS to show some default icon. (#4700)

  • (Windows) Enable longPathAware option in built application’s manifest in order to support long file paths on Windows 10 v.1607 and later. (#5424)

Bugfix

  • Fix loading of plugin-type modules at run-time of the frozen application: If the plugin path is one character longer than sys._MEIPATH (e.g. “$PWD/p/plugin_1” and “$PWD/dist/main”), the plugin relative-imports a sub-module (of the plugin) and the frozen application contains a module of the same name, the frozen application module was imported. (#4141, #4299)

  • Ensure that spec for frozen packages has submodule_search_locations set in order to fix compatibility with importlib_resources 3.2.0 and later. (#5396)

  • Fix: No rebuild if “noarchive” build-option changes. (#5404)

  • (OSX) Fix the problem with Python shared library collected from recent python versions not being loaded due to invalidated signature. (#5062, #5272, #5434)

  • (Windows) PyInstaller’s default icon is no longer built into the bootloader, but added at freeze-time. Thus, when specifiying an icon, only that icon is contained in the executable and displayed for a shortcut. (#870, #2995)

  • (Windows) Fix “toc is bad” error messages when passing a VSVersionInfo as the version parameter to EXE() in a .spec file. (#5445)

  • (Windows) Fix exception when trying to read a manifest from an exe or dll. (#5403)

  • (Windows) Fix the --runtime-tmpdir option by creating paths if they don’t exist and expanding environment variables (e.g. %LOCALAPPDATA%). (#3301, #4579, #4720)

Hooks

  • (GNU/Linux) Collect xcbglintegrations and egldeviceintegrations plugins as part of Qt5Gui. (#5349)

  • (macOS) Fix: Unable to code sign apps built with GTK (#5435)

  • (Windows) Add a hook for win32ctypes.core. (#5250)

  • Add hook for scipy.spatial.transform.rotation to fix compatibility with SciPy 1.6.0. (#5456)

  • Add hook-gi.repository.GtkosxApplication to fix TypeError with Gtk macOS apps. (#5385)

  • Add hooks utilities to find binary dependencies of Anaconda distributions. (#5213)

  • Fix the Qt5 library availability check in PyQt5 and PySide2 hooks to re-enable support for Qt5 older than 5.8. (#5425)

  • Implement exec_statement_rc() and exec_script_rc() as exit-code returning counterparts of exec_statement() and exec_script(). Implement can_import_module() helper for hooks that need to query module availability. (#5301)

  • Limit the impact of a failed sub-package import on the result of collect_submodules() to ensure that modules from all other sub-packages are collected. (#5426)

  • Removed obsolete pygame hook. (#5362)

  • Update keyring hook to collect metadata, which is required for backend discovery. (#5245)

Bootloader

  • (GNU/Linux) Reintroduce executable resolution via readlink() on /proc/self/exe and preserve the process name using prctl() with PR_GET_NAME and PR_SET_NAME. (#5232)

  • (Windows) Create temporary directories with user’s SID instead of S-1-3-4, to work around the lack of support for the latter in wine. This enables onefile builds to run under wine again. (#5216)

  • (Windows) Fix a bug in path-handling code with paths exceeding PATH_MAX, which is caused by use of _snprintf instead of snprintf when building with MSC. Requires Visual Studio 2015 or later. Clean up the MSC codepath to address other compiler warnings. (#5320)

  • (Windows) Fix building of bootloader’s test suite under Windows with Visual Studio. This fixes build errors when cmocka is present in the build environment. (#5318)

  • (Windows) Fix compiler warnings produced by MinGW 10.2 in order to allow building the bootloader without having to suppress the warnings. (#5322)

  • (Windows) Fix windowed+debug bootloader variant not properly displaying the exception message and traceback information when the frozen script terminates due to uncaught exception. (#5446)

PyInstaller Core

  • (Windows) Avoid using UPX with DLLs that have control flow guard (CFG) enabled. (#5382)

  • Avoid using .pyo module file suffix (removed since PEP-488) in noarchive mode. (#5383)

  • Improve support for PEP-420 namespace packages. (#5354)

  • Strip absolute paths from .pyc modules collected in the CArchive (PKG). This enables build reproducibility without having to match the location of the build environment. (#5380)

4.1 (2020-11-18)

Features

  • Add support for Python 3.9. (#5289)

  • Add support for Python 3.8. (#4311)

Bugfix

  • Fix endless recursion if a package’s __init__ module is an extension module. (#5157)

  • Remove duplicate logging messages (#5277)

  • Fix sw_64 architecture support (#5296)

  • (AIX) Include python-malloc labeled libraries in search for libpython. (#4210)

Hooks

  • Add exclude_datas, include_datas, and filter_submodules to collect_all(). These arguments map to the excludes and includes arguments of collect_data_files, and to the filter argument of collect_submodules. (#5113)

  • Add hook for difflib to not pull in doctests, which is only required when run as main programm.

  • Add hook for distutils.util to not pull in lib2to3 unittests, which will be rearly used in frozen packages.

  • Add hook for heapq to not pull in doctests, which is only required when run as main programm.

  • Add hook for multiprocessing.util to not pull in python test-suite and thus e.g. tkinter.

  • Add hook for numpy._pytesttester to not pull in pytest.

  • Add hook for pickle to not pull in doctests and argpargs, which are only required when run as main programm.

  • Add hook for PIL.ImageFilter to not pull numpy, which is an optional component.

  • Add hook for setuptools to not pull in numpy, which is only imported if installed, not mean to be a dependency

  • Add hook for zope.interface to not pull in pytest unittests, which will be rearly used in frozen packages.

  • Add hook-gi.repository.HarfBuzz to fix Typelib error with Gtk apps. (#5133)

  • Enable overriding Django settings path by DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE environment variable. (#5267)

  • Fix collect_system_data_files to scan the given input path instead of its parent. File paths returned by collect_all_system_data are now relative to the input path. (#5110)

  • Fix argument order in exec_script() and eval_script(). (#5300)

  • Gevent hook does not unnecessarily bundle HTML documentation, __pycache__ folders, tests nor generated .c and .h files (#4857)

  • gevent: Do not pull in test-suite (still to be refined)

  • Modify hook for gevent to exclude test submodules. (#5201)

  • Prevent .pyo files from being collected by collect_data_files when include_py_files is False. (#5141)

  • Prevent output to stdout during module imports from ending up in the modules list collected by collect_submodules. (#5244)

  • Remove runtime hook and fix regular hook for matplotlib’s data to support matplotlib>=3.3.0, fix deprecation warning on version 3.1<= & <3.3, and behave normally for versions <3.1. (#5006)

  • Remove support for deprecated PyQt4 and PySide (#5118, #5126)

  • setuptools: Exclude outdated compat modules.

  • Update sqlalchemy hook to support v1.3.19 and later, by adding sqlalchemy.ext.baked as a hidden import (#5128)

  • Update tkinter hook to collect Tcl modules directory (tcl8) in addition to Tcl/Tk data directories. (#5175)

  • (GNU/Linux) {PyQt5,PySide2}.QtWebEngineWidgets: fix search for extra NSS libraries to prevent an error on systems where /lib64/nss/*.so comes up empty. (#5149)

  • (OSX) Avoid collecting data from system Tcl/Tk framework in tkinter hook as we do not collect their shared libraries, either. Affects only python versions that still use the system Tcl/Tk 8.5. (#5217)

  • (OSX) Correctly locate the tcl/tk framework bundled with official python.org python builds from v.3.6.5 on. (#5013)

  • (OSX) Fix the QTWEBENGINEPROCESS_PATH set in PyQt5.QtWebEngineWidgets rthook. (#5183)

  • (OSX) PySide2.QtWebEngineWidgets: add QtQmlModels to included libraries. (#5150)

  • (Windows) Remove the obsolete python2.4-era _handle_broken_tcl_tk work-around for old virtual environments from the tkinter hook. (#5222)

Bootloader

  • Fix freeing memory allocted by Python using free() instead of PyMem_RawFree(). (#4441)

  • (GNU/Linux) Avoid segfault when temp path is missing. (#5255)

  • (GNU/Linux) Replace a strncpy() call in pyi_path_dirname() with snprintf() to ensure that the resulting string is always null-terminated. (#5212)

  • (OSX) Added capability for already-running apps to accept URL & drag’n drop events via Apple Event forwarding (#5276)

  • (OSX) Bump MACOSX_DEPLOYMENT_TARGET from 10.7 to 10.13. (#4627, #4886)

  • (OSX) Fix to reactivate running app on “reopen” (#5295)

  • (Windows) Use _wfullpath() instead of _fullpath() in pyi_path_fullpath to allow non-ASCII characters in the path. (#5189)

Documentation

  • Add zlib to build the requirements in the Building the Bootlooder section of the docs. (#5130)

PyInstaller Core

  • Add informative message what do to if RecurrsionError occurs. (#4406, #5156)

  • Prevent a local directory with clashing name from shadowing a system library. (#5182)

  • Use module loaders to get module content instea of an quirky way semming from early Python 2.x times. (#5157)

  • (OSX) Exempt the Tcl/Tk dynamic libraries in the system framework from relative path overwrite. Fix missing Tcl/Tk dynlib on older python.org builds that still make use of the system framework. (#5172)

Test-suite and Continuous Integration

  • Replace skipif_xxx for platform-specific tests by markers. (#1427)

  • Test/CI: Test failures are automatically retried once. (#5214)

Bootloader build

  • Fix AppImage builds that were broken since PyInstaller 3.6. (#4693)

  • Update build system to use Python 3.

  • OSX: Fixed the ineffectiveness of the --distpath argument for the BUNDLE step. (#4892)

  • OSX: Improve codesigning and notarization robustness. (#3550, #5112)

  • OSX: Use high resolution mode by default for GUI applications. (#4337)

4.0 (2020-08-08)

Features

  • Provide setuptools entrypoints to enable other packages to provide PyInstaller hooks specific to that package, along with tests for these hooks.

    Maintainers of Python packages requiring hooks are invited to use this new feature and provide up-to-date PyInstaller support along with their package. This is quite easy, see our sample project for more information (#4232, #4301, #4582). Many thanks to Bryan A. Jones for implementing the important parts.

  • A new package pyinstaller-hooks-contrib provides monthly updated hooks now. This package is installed automatically when installing PyInstaller, but can be updated independently. Many thanks to Legorooj for setting up the new package and moving the hooks there.

  • Added the excludes and includes arguments to the hook utility function collect_data_files.

  • Change the hook collection order so that the hook-priority is command line, then entry-point, then PyInstaller builtins. (#4876)

Bugfix

  • (AIX) Include python-malloc labeled libraries in search for libpython. (#4738)

  • (win32) Fix Security Alerts caused by subtle implementation differences between posix anf windows in os.path.dirname(). (#4707)

  • (win32) Fix struct format strings for versioninfo. (#4861)

  • (Windows) cv2: bundle the opencv_videoio_ffmpeg*.dll, if available. (#4999)

  • (Windows) GLib: bundle the spawn helper executables for g_spawn* API. (#5000)

  • (Windows) PySide2.QtNetwork: search for SSL DLLs in PrefixPath in addition to BinariesPath. (#4998)

  • (Windows) When building with 32-bit python in onefile mode, set the requestedExecutionLevel manifest key every time and embed the manifest. (#4992)

    • (AIX) Fix uninitialized variable. (#4728, #4734)

  • Allow building on a different drive than the source. (#4820)

  • Consider Python<version> as possible library binary path. Fixes issue where python is not found if Python3 is installed via brew on OSX (#4895)

  • Ensure shared dependencies from onefile packages can be opened in the bootloader.

  • Ensuring repeatable builds of base_library.zip. (#4654)

  • Fix FileNotFoundError showing up in utils/misc.py which occurs when a namespace was processed as an filename. (#4034)

  • Fix multipackaging. The MERGE class will now have the correct relative paths between shared dependencies which can correctly be opened by the bootloader. (#1527, #4303)

  • Fix regression when trying to avoid hard-coded paths in .spec files.

  • Fix SIGTSTP signal handling to allow typing Ctrl-Z from terminal. (#4244)

  • Update the base library to support encrypting Python bytecode (--key option) again. Many thanks to Matteo Bertini for finally fixing this. (#2365, #3093, #3133, #3160, #3198, #3316, #3619, #4241, #4652)

  • When stripping the leading parts of paths in compiled code objects, the longest possible import path will now be stripped. (#4922)

Incompatible Changes

  • Remove support for Python 2.7. The minimum required version is now Python 3.5. The last version supporting Python 2.7 was PyInstaller 3.6. (#4623)

  • Many hooks are now part of the new pyinstaller-hooks-contrib repository. See below for a detailed list.

Hooks

  • Add hook for scipy.stats._stats (needed for scipy since 1.5.0). (#4981)

  • Prevent hook-nltk from adding non-existing directories. (#3900)

  • Fix importlib_resources hook for modern versions (after 1.1.0). (#4889)

  • Fix hidden imports in pkg_resources and packaging (#5044)

    • Add yet more hidden imports to pkg_resources hook.

    • Mirror the pkg_resources hook for packaging which may or may not be duplicate of pkg_resources._vendor.packaging.

  • Update pkg_resources hook for setuptools v45.0.0.

  • Add QtQmlModels to included libraries for QtWebEngine on OS X (#4631).

  • Fix detecting Qt5 libraries and dependencies from conda-forge builds (#4636).

  • Add an AssertionError message so that users who get an error due to Hook conflicts can resolve it (#4626).

  • These hooks have been moved to the new pyinstaller-hooks-contrib repository: BTrees, Crypto, Cryptodome, IPython, OpenGL, OpenGL_accelerate, Xlib, accessible_output2, adios, aliyunsdkcore, amazonproduct, appdirs, appy, astor, astroid, astropy, avro, bacon, boto, boto3, botocore, certifi, clr, countrycode, cryptography, cv2, cx_Oracle, cytoolz, dateparser, dclab, distorm3, dns, docutils, docx, dynaconf, enchant, enzyme, eth_abi, eth_account, eth_hash, eth_keyfile, eth_utils, faker, flex, fmpy, gadfly, gooey, google.*, gst, gtk, h5py, httplib, httplib2, imageio, imageio_ffmpeg, jedi, jinja2, jira, jsonpath_rw_ext, jsonschema, jupyterlab, kinterbasdb, langcodes, lensfunpy, libaudioverse, llvmlite, logilab, lxml, lz4, magic, mako, markdown, migrate, mpl_toolkits, mssql, mysql, nacl, names, nanite, nbconvert, nbdime, nbformat, ncclient, netCDF4, nltk, nnpy, notebook, numba, openpyxl, osgeo, passlib, paste, patsy, pendulum, phonenumbers, pint, pinyin, psychopy, psycopg2, pubsub, pyarrow, pycountry, pycparser, pyexcel, pyexcelerate, pylint, pymssql, pyodbc, pyopencl, pyproj, pysnmp, pytest, pythoncom, pyttsx, pywintypes, pywt, radicale, raven, rawpy, rdflib, redmine, regex, reportlab, reportlab, resampy, selenium, shapely, skimage, sklearn, sound_lib, sounddevice, soundfile, speech_recognition, storm, tables, tcod, tensorflow, tensorflow_corethon, text_unidecode, textdistance, torch, ttkthemes, ttkwidgets, u1db, umap, unidecode, uniseg, usb, uvloop, vtkpython, wavefile, weasyprint, web3, webrtcvad, webview, win32com, wx, xml.dom, xml.sax, xsge_gui, zeep, zmq.

  • These hooks have been added while now moved to the new pyinstaller-hooks-contrib repository: astor (#4400, #4704), argon2 (#4625) bcrypt. (#4735), (Bluetooth Low Energy platform Agnostic Klient for Python) (#4649) jaraco.text (#4576, #4632), LightGBM. (#4634), xmldiff (#4680), puremagic (identify a file based off it’s magic numbers) (#4709) webassets (#4760), tensorflow_core (to support tensorflow module forwarding logic (#4400, #4704)

  • These changes have been applied to hooks now moved to the new pyinstaller-hooks-contrib repository

    • Update Bokeh hook for v2.0.0. (#4742, #4746)

    • Fix shapely hook on Windows for non-conda shapely installations. (#2834, #4749)

Bootloader

  • Rework bootloader from using strcpy/strncpy with “is this string terminated”-check to use snprintf(); check succes at more places. (This started from fixing GCC warnings for strncpy and strncat.)

  • Fix: When copying files, too much data was copied in most cases. This corrupted the file and inhibited using shared dependencies. (#4303)

  • In debug and windowed mode, show the traceback in dialogs to help debug pyiboot01_bootstrap errors. (#4213, #4592)

  • Started a small test-suite for bootloader basic functions. (#4585)

Documentation

  • Add platform-specific usage notes and bootloader build notes for AIX. (#4731)

PyInstaller Core

Bootloader build

  • (AIX) The argument -X32 or -X64 is not recognized by the AIX loader - so this code needs to be removed. (#4730, #4731)

  • (OSX) Allow end users to override MACOSX_DEPLOYMENT_TARGET and mmacosx-version-min via environment variables and set 10.7 as the fallback value for both. (#4677)

  • Do not print info about --noconfirm when option is already being used. (#4727)

  • Update waf to version 2.0.20 (#4839)