How to include only needed modules in pyinstaller?

Question

I'm using pyinstaller to generate an .exe file for my single python file, but the size is more than 30MB and the startup is very slow. From what I have gathered is that pyinstaller by default bundles a lot of stuff that are not needed. Is there a way to make sure that pyinstaller figures out what is only needed and bundles only them? My import section on my script looks like this:

import datetime
import os
import numpy as np
import pandas as pd 
import xlsxwriter
from tkinter import *

EDIT:

Or is there also a way to see the list of all modules it has bundled? So I can go through them and exclude the ones I don't need.

Answer 1

For this you need to create a separate environment, because currently you are reading all the modules you have installed on your computer. To create environment run commands

1 - if you don't have one, create a requirements.txt file that holds all packages that you are using, you could create one with:

pip freeze > requirements.txt

2 - create env folder:

python -m venv projectName

3 - activate the environment:

source projectName/bin/activate

4 - install them:

pip install -r requirements.txt

alternatively if you know you are using only wxpython you could just pip install wxpython

5 - then finally you can run pyinstaller on your main script with the --path arg as explained in this answer :

pyinstaller --paths projectName/lib/python3.7/site-packages script.py

Answer 2

I don't think it can figure that out for you. If there are any specific modules taking a while to load, use the --exclude-module flag to list all the modules you want to exclude.

edit: this answer may have some more helpful info

Answer 3

I ended up using cx_Freeze in the end. It seems to work much better than py2exe or pyinstaller . I wrote setup.py file that looks like this:

import os
import shutil
import sys
from cx_Freeze import setup, Executable

os.environ['TCL_LIBRARY'] = r'C:\bin\Python37-32\tcl\tcl8.6'
os.environ['TK_LIBRARY'] = r'C:\bin\Python37-32\tcl\tk8.6'

__version__ = '1.0.0'
base = None
if sys.platform == 'win32':
    base = 'Win32GUI'

include_files = ['am.png']
includes = ['tkinter']
excludes = ['matplotlib', 'sqlite3']
packages = ['numpy', 'pandas', 'xlsxwriter']

setup(
    name='TestApp',
    description='Test App',
    version=__version__,
    executables=[Executable('test.py', base=base)],
    options = {'build_exe': {
        'packages': packages,
        'includes': includes,
        'include_files': include_files,
        'include_msvcr': True,
        'excludes': excludes,
    }},
)

path = os.path.abspath(os.path.join(os.path.realpath(__file__), os.pardir))
build_path = os.path.join(path, 'build', 'exe.win32-3.7')
shutil.copy(r'C:\bin\Python37-32\DLLs\tcl86t.dll', build_path)
shutil.copy(r'C:\bin\Python37-32\DLLs\tk86t.dll', build_path)

Any then one can either run python setup.py build_exe to generate an executable or python setup.py bdist_msi to generate an installer.