Making app package smaller

[Elliott Balsley]

Even for a very simple python code, PyInstaller adds a lot of extra files.  Is there a recommended way to remove some of this to make the app smaller?  For example, a Python code with just one line:

print('Hello world.')

The app package is 13.5 MB on macOS, or 5.9MB in one-file mode.  Some of the largest files in the package are:

libcrypto.1.1.dylib 2.8M

unicodedata.cpython-37m-darwin.so 1.1M

libssl.1.1.dylib 556K

libncursesw.5.dylib 433K

[Pax Williams]

Have you tried using UPX?

https://pyinstaller.readthedocs.io/en/stable/usage.html#using-upx

[Elliott Balsley]

Thanks for the tip, I had not tried that.  I installed UPX (version 3.96 from home-brew) and it saved me a whopping 0.0001 percent.  The single file binary for "hello world" went from 5870240 bytes to 5870233 bytes.

[bwoodsend]

UPX is great for onedir builds but both UPX and onefile use zlib compression so using both simultaneously won’t accomplish anything. The OpenSSL stuff (libcrypto and libssl) are optional components of Python so if you were really determined you could compile Python itself from source with those components disabled then run PyInstaller but it’ll be a lot of work.

​

[Elliott Balsley]

Okay, good idea.  That does sound like a lot of work though, probably not worth it for me.  I'm just curious.

For what it's worth, UPX makes no difference on a onedir build either.  See below, it's exactly the same bytes.  Is there some way to see if UPX is actually working?

 % echo "print('Hello world.')" > helloworld.py

 % pyinstaller --noupx helloworld.py

 % du -d 1 dist       

26528 dist/helloworld

26528 dist

 % rm -rf dist build       

 % pyinstaller helloworld.py

 % du -d 1 dist                     

26528 dist/helloworld

26528 dist