Convert a Python Script into an executable

Ndamulelo Nemakhavhani

Apr 18, 2020·2 min read

This simple guide will show you how you can use pyinstaller and argparse to create a simple console application with python.

Required tools

• Python 3.x (with pip)
• Python code editor e.g. Pycharm
• psutil

$ pip install --upgrade psutil

• pyinstaller

$ pip install --upgrade pyinstaller

Lets try this out by creating a simple console app that will list processes or applications that are currently running on your PC.

1. Create a python script named proclist.py

• We use psutil.process_iter([‘pid’, ‘name’]) to get a list of all processes running on a machine
• The argparse ibrary allows the user of our script to specify a limit on the number of processes with print to the console.
• At this point we can distribute out script as a .py file and any user with python installed on their machine will be able to use our app.

Lets take it a step further

# We want the user to run the app as follows$ proclist --limit 9# instead of,$ python proclist.py --limit 9

2. Create an executable using pyinstaller

• Inside the directory where you script is located, run

$ pyinstaller --name proclist --onefile proclist.py

• This will create an executable inside distpath directory name proclist.exe
• At this point we can proceed to run our standalone executable as follows:

$ cd dist
$ proclist --limit 10

• You should see an output similar to this:

Closing remarks

• You can go ahead and add the generated executable to the system path so that it can be executed from any location in the command line shell.
• You might also want to explore the argparse library further to see if you can add more functionality to our simple application. e.g. List 5 applications with the highest cpu usage in the last 5 minutes.