Problem trying to freeze an executable which imports distutils modules (directly or indirectly)

cx_freeze_and_distutils.md

cxFreeze and distutils

Problem

When trying to freeze a script which imports any distutils module (for example, distutils.dist), the script fails at runtime with an exception like this:

>   from distutils import dist, sysconfig
E   ImportError: cannot import name dist

(In my case, the error was raised by matplotlib, which tries to import distutils.dist).

The problem is easy to reproduce:

$ virtualenv myenv
$ source myenv/bin/activate
$ pip install cx_freeze

# contents of setup.py
from cx_Freeze import setup, Executable

build_exe_options = {}

setup(
    name="foo",
    version="0.1",
    description="My app",
    options={"build_exe": build_exe_options},
    executables=[Executable("foo_main.py", base=None)],
)

# contents of foo_main.py
import distutils.dist

$ python setup.py build

Running the produced executable should raise the same error (tested with cx-freeze 4.3.4).

This problem happens because distutils does not install all its modules into the virtualenv, it only creates a package with some magic code in the __init__ file to import its submodules dynamically. This is a problem to cx-freeze's static module analysis, which complains during the build command that it can't find distutils modules.

Workaround

The workaround used was to tell cx-freeze to exclude distutils and add the package from the original interpreter (not from the virtualenv) manually.

# contents of setup.py
from cx_Freeze import setup, Executable

import distutils
import opcode
import os

# opcode is not a virtualenv module, so we can use it to find the stdlib; this is the same
# trick used by distutils itself it installs itself into the virtualenv
distutils_path = os.path.join(os.path.dirname(opcode.__file__), 'distutils')
build_exe_options = {'include_files': [(distutils_path, 'distutils')], "excludes": ["distutils"]}

setup(
    name="foo",
    version="0.1",
    description="My app",
    options={"build_exe": build_exe_options},
    executables=[Executable("foo_main.py", base=None)],
)

[email protected] with python3.6 in a virtualenv still required the workaround.

@jeffrothkirch @NeroVanbiervliet @VictoryShima
You can take a look in my comment at: marcelotduarte/cx_Freeze#443
And suggest any modification to sample to test it. I'll try to solve this for 6.2 release.