Is there a Portable app from pythonscad
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Matthieu Hendriks
May 11, 2026, 8:55:41 AMMay 11
to PythonSCAD
I would like to use pythonscad on my business laptop but I have no installation rights, however I'm able to run portable apps. Is anybody able te create a portable app for pythonscad?
John David
May 11, 2026, 10:39:53 AMMay 11
to Matthieu Hendriks, PythonSCAD
Are you able to run programs from a thumb drive? Depending on what the exact restrictions are for your machine, you might not be able to do that. As a note, when I last worked for NASA they did *not* allow this on any machines used for government work (without specific prior authorization).
On Mon, May 11, 2026 at 8:55 AM Matthieu Hendriks <matthieu...@gmail.com> wrote:
I would like to use pythonscad on my business laptop but I have no installation rights, however I'm able to run portable apps. Is anybody able te create a portable app for pythonscad?
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nomike Postmann
May 12, 2026, 3:13:23 PMMay 12
to PythonSCAD
Hi!
I assume you're talking about a Windows machine.
We do offer a zip distribution of PythonSCAD which you can find on https://pythonscad.org/downloads/ on the top.
It contains PythonSCAD and all relevant DLLs in one zip file. You just extract it and should be able to execute it right away, no need of installing it.
I have a business laptop for my day-job running Windows 11 and it is also heavily restricted. But I can run PythonSCAD just fine with this method.
There might be one caveat though:
You could click on "More info" and a button labled "Run anyway" should appear, which will allow you to run the program.
This should only appear once and Windows should remember that choice.
Your IT department could however have a Group Policy in place removing the "Run anyway" button from that dialog.
There might be another thing to try:
When you download a zip file (or any file for that matter), at least Microsoft Edge and probably other Browsers as well, add a hidden alternative NTFS data-stream to the file indicating that it has been downloaded from the internet (that's why sometimes you get a message warning you about a program being downloaded from the internet asking you whether you really want to launch it). Your IT department might have put policies in place to also prevent you from running applications like this.
There are things you can try to workaround this though to not have that alternative NTFS data-stream marker. Depending on what's available to you you might try to:
- use Firefox to download PythonSCAD (though I'm not 100% sure if Firefox really omits adding that stream)
- use `wget` or `curl` which definitely do not add it.
- use WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux) which is also guaranteed not to do that.
- use 7-Zip to extract the zip file. 7-Zip also does not set those alternative data-streams.
I assume you're talking about a Windows machine.
We do offer a zip distribution of PythonSCAD which you can find on https://pythonscad.org/downloads/ on the top.
It contains PythonSCAD and all relevant DLLs in one zip file. You just extract it and should be able to execute it right away, no need of installing it.
I have a business laptop for my day-job running Windows 11 and it is also heavily restricted. But I can run PythonSCAD just fine with this method.
There might be one caveat though:
We
currenty do not yet sign our Windows builds, so you might get an error
message stating that "Windows protected your PC", looking similar to
this:
You could click on "More info" and a button labled "Run anyway" should appear, which will allow you to run the program.
This should only appear once and Windows should remember that choice.
Your IT department could however have a Group Policy in place removing the "Run anyway" button from that dialog.
There might be another thing to try:
When you download a zip file (or any file for that matter), at least Microsoft Edge and probably other Browsers as well, add a hidden alternative NTFS data-stream to the file indicating that it has been downloaded from the internet (that's why sometimes you get a message warning you about a program being downloaded from the internet asking you whether you really want to launch it). Your IT department might have put policies in place to also prevent you from running applications like this.
There are things you can try to workaround this though to not have that alternative NTFS data-stream marker. Depending on what's available to you you might try to:
- use Firefox to download PythonSCAD (though I'm not 100% sure if Firefox really omits adding that stream)
- use `wget` or `curl` which definitely do not add it.
- use WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux) which is also guaranteed not to do that.
- use 7-Zip to extract the zip file. 7-Zip also does not set those alternative data-streams.
- extract the zip file to a drive which is not NTFS (e.g. a USB thumb drive, formatted to FAT32 or exFAT) and copy it mack to your harddisk. These filesystems don't support those data-streams so in this case they just get lost. Though most corporate environments have blocked mass storage media on Windows computers these days.
- temporarily copy PythonSCAD to a network mapped share. This also should get rid of those data-streams as network-shares usually do not support them.
We're working on having Windows binaries properly signed in the future, but as our project doesn't have any kind of funding right now and those certificates aren't exactly cheap, we're still looking for a solution for this where we don't have to pay USD 300 per year out of our own pockets.
But this whole issue might be solved in the near future.
But this whole issue might be solved in the near future.
If you have any more issues, please let us know. We will be happy to look into it.
Regards
nomike
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