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Package a Python Qt (PySide) application for Windows (.exe)

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That's fairly easy to package a Python Qt (PySide) application for Windows (and even easier on Linux with cxfreeze).

Let see two different ways of doing so.

1. py2exe

Pros

• Easy

• Support multiple binaries

Cons

• Might miss some dependencies

Download

Py2Exe Website
There are binaries for both win32 and win64.

Basic setup

basic_setup.py

from distutils.core import setup
import py2exe

setup(
    windows = ['pysideApp1.py','pysideApp2.py'],
    options = {
        "py2exe" : {
            "includes" : ['sys', 'tempfile', 'zipfile', 'mmap', 'encodings',
                          'json', 'hashlib', 'datetime', 'struct',
                          'os', 'time', 'random', 'math', 'xmlrpclib', 'Crypto']
        }
    }
)

Compile

$ python basic_setup.py py2exe

That's it!
Look in your "dist" folder and you should have your application

2. PyInstaller

Pros

• Seems to detect the required libraries much better

Cons

• Last stable version (1.5.1 as today) does not support multiple binaries
• Need a little more config

Download

PyInstaller Website
No need to install, just extract somewhere.

PySide setup

pyside.spec

import os

a = Analysis(
    [os.path.join(HOMEPATH,'support\\_mountzlib.py')
        , os.path.join(HOMEPATH,'support\\useUnicode.py')
        , os.path.normpath(os.path.join(currentDir, 'main.py'))
        , os.path.normpath(os.path.join(currentDir, 'importantLib.py'))
        # add the files you want PyInstaller to analyse the "import" statements
        # to detect the libraries to include
    ],
     pathex=['C:\\Python27\\pyinstaller-1.5.1']
)
pyz = PYZ(a.pure)
exe = EXE(pyz,
          a.scripts,
          exclude_binaries=1,
          name=os.path.join('build\\pyi.win32\\build_output', 'your_application.exe'),
          debug=False,
          strip=False,
          upx=True,
          console=False )
coll = COLLECT( exe,
               a.binaries,
               a.zipfiles,
               a.datas,
               strip=False,
               upx=True,
               name=os.path.join('dist', 'dist_output'))

Compile

Move to your pyinstaller.py location and run:
$ python pyinstaller.py "C:\path\to\pyside.spec"

That's it!
Look in your "dist_output" folder and you should have your application

Postface

Both methods work fine.
The output folder with PyInstaller is a little bigger (~10MB, whereas the one with py2exe is ~8MB).
However, it seems to include more libraries, even though I didn't manually specified any specific library, I just gave the 2 main py files of my program, so maybe more reliable.