run as administrator problem with py2exe

Question

I am having this problem that we compiled our python project into an exe with py2exe and the resulting exe does not work unless it is executed as an administrator.

I wanted to ask that is this supposed to happen ?? As in there are so many applications that we can run as not an administrator so is there any way I can convert my python code to such an application ...

Thanks a lot..

Answer 1

It sounds like your application is attempting to write to a directory for which the basic user doesn't have access; most likely the "Program Files" directory. I believe in Vista/Win7 this is not allowed, and the standard convention is to write to the user's appdata folder, for any user data you might wish to store.

You can reliably obtain the location of this directory using the ctypes module, here's an example:

import ctypes
from ctypes import wintypes

def get_appdata_directory():
    CSIDL_APPDATA = 0x001a

    dll = ctypes.windll.shell32
    app_data_directory = ctypes.create_unicode_buffer(wintypes.MAX_PATH)

    found = dll.SHGetFolderPathW(0, CSIDL_APPDATA, 0, 0, app_data_directory)

    # FYI: if `found` is False, then it failed to locate the appdata directory
    # and app_data_directory.value is empty. So you might want to add some
    # code here to verify that a valid path is going to be returned.

    # This would probably only happen on older versions of windows, 
    # but, this is just a guess as I don't have any older OSs available
    # for testing. (see my note below)

    return app_data_directory.value

appdata = get_appdata_directory()
print(appdata)
# outputs something such as: 'C:\Users\bob\AppData'

Note: I believe the appdata folder was introduced with WinXP/Win2k. Not sure about WinME and prior, however, I don't believe you have to worry about the administrator restrictions on these earlier OSs. If you really care to support them, you could use python's builtin platform module along with some conditionals, then simply write user data to the "Program Files" directory for the archaic versions of Windows.

Answer 2

I've had serious problems with getting py2exe to work. Luckily I found the excellent PyInstaller which not only works, but also creates smaller executables. I haven't ran into the problem you mention with PyInstaller so I recommend trying it.

http://www.pyinstaller.org/