Once you have a PyQt5 application, you want to compile your Python source code into a standalone executable. Furthermore, you normally want to create an installer so your users can easily set up your app.
This example uses fbs to create a standalone executable and an installer for the text editor in example 07.
You can find a modified version of the "old" main.py in src/main/python/main.py. It only has a few extra lines:
We import fbs's ApplicationContext:
from fbs_runtime.application_context.PyQt5 import ApplicationContext
Further down, we instantiate it:
appctxt = ApplicationContext()
We no longer need to create a QApplication. This is done automatically by fbs.
The editor's About dialog shows an icon:
This is done in the original code as follows:
text = "...<img src=icon.svg>..."
The new code however needs to be more flexible with regard to the icon's path. When running from source, the icon lies in src/main/resources/base/icon.svg. When running on the user's system however, it lies in the installation directory.
To handle this, the new code uses fbs's ApplicationContext.get_resource(...) method:
text = "...<img src=%r>..." % appctxt.get_resource("icon.svg")
This automatically handles the different possible locations of the image.
Because we didn't create the QApplication ourselves, we finally use the following call instead of only app.exec_():
appctxt.app.exec_()
To run this example yourself, you need fbs installed as per the instructions here. Then, you can do use the following command to run the text editor:
fbs run
The following command then compiles the Python source code into a standalone executable in your target/ directory:
fbs freeze
Finally, the following creates an installer that you can distribute to other people:
fbs installer
Please note that this last command requires that you have NSIS installed and on your PATH on Windows, or fpm on Linux.