Error -3 from inflate: unknown compression method

[Pax Williams]

I'm trying to package a CLI app as a Linux standalone executable using PyInstaller. I don't have a Linux OS so I used Vagrant to package it; used the CentOS 7 box since the server where the executable will run is also CentOS 7. 

 I was able to create a standalone executable and it ran successfully with a fresh CentOS 7 Vagrant machine (no provisioning scripts / no python3 and its dependencies installed). 

But when I run the executable in the server, it gives me this error: 

[user@server ~]$ emails_automation/emails --help 

[22874] Error -3 from inflate: unknown compression method 

[22874] Error decompressing _asyncio.cpython-38-x86_64-linux-gnu.so 

Failed to write all bytes for _asyncio.cpython-38-x86_64-linux-gnu.so 

fwrite: Bad address 

Some Observations

✅   Both VM and the actual server has the same glibc version: 

VM: 

[root@localhost emails]# ldd --version 

ldd (GNU libc) 2.17 

Server: 

[user@server ~]$ ldd --version 

ldd (GNU libc) 2.17 

🤔   Searching for "inflate: unknown compression method" in the pyinstaller repo and returned files related to `zlib`. So I checked whether zlib is installed in the server, and the fresh CentOS 7 VM (the one without any provisioning scripts) by running the python REPL and both doesn't give import errors which tells me zlib is installed.

VM:

[vagrant@localhost ~]$ python

Python 2.7.5 (default, Apr  2 2020, 13:16:51) 

[GCC 4.8.5 20150623 (Red Hat 4.8.5-39)] on linux2

Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.

>>> import zlib

>>> zlib.crc32

<built-in function crc32>

Server:

[user@server ~]$ python

Python 2.7.5 (default, Nov 16 2020, 22:23:17) 

[GCC 4.8.5 20150623 (Red Hat 4.8.5-44)] on linux2

Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.

>>> import zlib

>>> zlib.crc32

<built-in function crc32>

Any pointers for me?