Packaging Pitfalls

While PyOxidizer is capable of building fully self-contained binaries containing a Python application, many Python packages and applications make assumptions that don’t hold inside PyOxidizer. This section talks about all the things that can go wrong when attempting to package a Python application.

C and Other Native Extension Modules

Many Python packages compile extension modules to native code. (Typically C is used to implement extension modules.)

PyOxidizer has varying levels of support for Python extension modules. In many cases, everything just works. But there are known incompatibilities and corner cases. See Working with Python Extension Modules for details.

Identifying PyOxidizer

Python code may want to know whether it is running in the context of PyOxidizer.

At packaging time, pip and setup.py invocations made by PyOxidizer should set a PYOXIDIZER=1 environment variable. setup.py scripts, etc can look for this environment variable to determine if they are being packaged by PyOxidizer.

At run-time, PyOxidizer will always set a sys.oxidized attribute with value True. So, Python code can test whether it is running in PyOxidizer like so:

import sys

if getattr(sys, 'oxidized', False):
    print('running in PyOxidizer!')