noobie question here. I've been writing a program in python3.5.1 and I'm managing pretty well with the built in libraries like tkinter but I'm starting to want to use libraries that aren't built in with python3.5.1.
The problem with this is that as far as I can tell if I use a library that isn't built into python the users of my program will have to download the library as well. Which would be a major pain in the ass for a lot of users. Am I correct in assuming this? Is there a way to work around this?
I don't mind having to download the stuff myself, but I would like my users to be able to run my program with just basic python3.5.1.
Thanks
Users need to download your program. And many Python programs do consist of multiple source files. In some cases you can simply include the external libraries you use with the files you're shipping to the user. But this may not work well if the libraries contain compiled C code and you're targeting multiple platforms.
Alternatively, you can simply document which packages users need to install to use your program. They can then use whatever system package manager they have, or PIP, etc.
I exported a game out of Construct 2 using their NWJS exporter. I need to distribute this game to a client who is not very technically adept to put it nicely. I think he would be able to run an exe-file by double-clicking it, but for example extracting a zip-file is probably too much to ask.
Is it possible to somehow distribute the result as a single executable file?
Here's what the folder that Construct made contains:
locales (folder)
d3dcompiler_47.dll
debug.log
dxwebsetup.exe
icudtl.dat
libEGL.dll
libEGLSv2.dll
natives_blob.bin
node.dll
nw.dll
nw.exe
nw_100_percent.pak
nw_200_percent.pak
nw_elf.dll
package.nw
resources.pak
Yes, use enigma virtual box or something similar. It can pack app into standalone app.exe with all files, libraries, etc.
Checkout How to package and distribute your apps on the NW.js official wiki
There are a few methods there covering not only windows.
We are in a networked Linux environment and what I'm looking for is a FOSS or generic system level method for managing what versions of executables and libraries get used, per session. The executables would preferably be installed on the network. The executables will be in-house tools and installs of commercial packages like Houdini, Maya and Nuke.
The need for this is that we'd prefer to have multiple versions of the software installed and available for the artists but there needs to be an easy way to select which version to use. As an added benefit, I'd like to be able to track the version of software used to generate a given output as metadata. I've worked at studios that did this successfully but I was not 100% up to speed on how it was achieved. Every executable in a given set was assigned a single uber version for the set. That way, the "approved packages" of the studio tools were all collapsed into a single package of tools that were known to work together.
Due to the way they install, some programs make setting this up easy (It's as simple as adding their install directories to $PATH). Other programs don't make it quite so easy. I'm particularly worried about how to handle the libraries a program might install. What's needed is a generic access method I can use to wrap everything into a clean front end.
Does anyone know of such a system available in the wild or am I going to have to implement it from scratch? Google hasn't been very helpful in finding a solution.
Thanks!
Check out the "modules" system at http://modules.sourceforge.net/ ; it's quite widely used in HPC.
There is eselect . I have only used it on funtoo(offspring of gentoo) but it seems to be doing what you need. It is also written entirely in BASH, so it should be quite possible to port to other distros.
I just finished porting an application from Windows into Linux.
I have to create an installer of the application.
The application is not open source => I should distribute the application's binaries (executable file, couple .so files, help files and images).
I found several methods to do it:
- RPM and DEB packages;
- installer in .sh files;
- Autopackage.
I don't like first method (RPM and DEB packages) because I don't want to mantain different packages for different Linux distros.
What is the best way to distribute a binary application for Linux?
Having been through this a couple of times with commercial products, I think the very best answer is to use the native installer for each supported platform. Anything else produces an unpleasant experience for the end-user, and in practice you have to test on every platform you want to support anyway, so it's not really a significant burden to maintain packages for each. The idea that you can create a binary that can "just work" on every platform out there, including some you've never even heard of, just really doesn't work all that well.
My recommendation is that you pick a platform or two to support initially (Red Hat and Ubuntu would be my suggestions) and then let user demand drive the creation of additional installation packages. Perhaps make it known that you're willing to support additional platforms, for a modest fee that covers your time and effort in packaging and testing on that platform. If a platform proves to be very different, you may need to charge more for ongoing support.
Oh, and I cannot overemphasize the value of virtual machines for scenarios like this. You need to build VMs for each platform you support, and perhaps multiple VMs per platform to make it easy to test different configurations.
There were a lot of good answers (mine included :)) here. Although that is more about binary compatibility (which you do need to worry about).
For installer I would recommend autopackage (we successfully released several versions of our software with it), they did the "installer.sh" part already and more (desktop integration for example).
You have to be careful and test your upgrade scenarios and stuff, depending on how complex you package structure is, but it is pretty neat overall. I fixed few bugs with dependency handling in 1.2.6, so it should be fine.
UPDATE: The original question was deleted, so reposting full answer here, ignore all references to autopackage, that was merged into Listaller, not sure if relevant parts survived.
For standard libraries (like crypto++, pthreads, etc) that are likely to be available in a distribution -- link dynamically and tell users to get them from their distro repository. Or link statically if it is feasible.
For weird libraries that you must control version of (if you want to deploy Qt4 app on territory of enemy gnomes for example), compile them yourself and install into a private spot only your app knows about.
Never install private libs into standard places unless you can be sure to not interfere with package systems of all distros you support. (and that they can't interfere with you either).
Use rpath instead of LD_LIBRARY_PATH, and set it properly for all you binaries and all dlls that reference each other. You can set rpath on you binary to "$ORIGIN;$ORIGIN/../lib;/opt/my/private/libs" and have linker search those places before any standard paths. (have to setsome linker flag for origin to work I think). Make sure to set rpath on your libs too: for example QtGui needs QtCore, and if user happens to install standard package with different version, you absolutely don't want it picked up (exe -> ../lib/QtGui.so (4.4.3) -> /usr/local/lib/QtCore.so (4.4.2) -- a sure way to die early).
If you compile with any rpath, you can change it later with chrpath, thus making it possible to tweak install location as part of post processing or install script.
Maintain binary compatibility. GLIB_C is pretty much static for your users, so you should link against some sufficiently old version. 2.3 is a safe bet. You can use APBuild -- a gcc wrapper that enforces GLIB_C version and does few other binary compatibility tricks, so you don't have to compile all you apps on a really old distro.
If you link to anything statically, it generally will have to be rebuilt with APBuild too, otherwise it is bound to drag newer GLIB_C symbols. All .so's you install privately will naturally have to be built with it too. Sometimes you have to patch third party libs to use older symbols. (I had to patch ruby to return real permissions instead of effective ones, since there is no such functions in older GLIB_C. Still not sure if I broke anything :)).
For integration with desktop environments (file associations, mime-types, icons, start menu entries, etc) use xdg-utils. Beware though, like everything on linux they don't really like spaces in filenames :). Make sure to test those things on each target distro -- xdg implementations are riddled with bugs and quirks.
For actual install you can either provide variety of native packages (rpm, deb and a few more), or roll out your own installer, or find installer that works on all distros bypassing native package managers. We successfully used Autopackage (same people who made APbuild) for that.
It's possible to install an RPM on Debian and an APT on RHEL.
If you are going to statically link this program, or dynamically link only with libraries that you will be distributing in the package, then it doesn't much matter how you distribute it. The simplest way is tar.gz and that would work.
OTOH if it is dynamically linked with system libraries, and particularly if it has dependencies on dynamic libraries that will be shared with the client's other applications, then you kind of need to do either RPM, APT, or both.
You may want to try out InstallBuilder. It is crossplatform (runs on Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, Solaris and nearly any other Unix platform out there). It is used by Intel, Motorola, GitHub, MySQL, Nokia/Trolltech and many other companies so you will be in good company :) In addition to binary installers, it can also create cross-distro RPMs and DEB packages.
InstallBuilder is commercial, but we offer free licenses for open source programs and very significant discounts for mISVs or solo-developers, just drop us a line.
Create a .tar.bz2 archive with the binary, then publish a feed for it, like this:
<?xml version="1.0" ?>
<interface uri="http://mysite/myprog.xml"
xmlns="http://zero-install.sourceforge.net/2004/injector/interface">
<name>MyProgram</name>
<summary>what it does</summary>
<description>A longer description goes here.</description>
<implementation main='bin/myprog'
id="sha1new=THEDIGEST"
version='1.0'>
<archive href='http://mysite/myprogram-1.0.tar.bz2'
size='10000'/>
</implementation>
</interface>
Sign it with your GPG key. You can use the tools on 0install.net to calculate the digest and add the GPG signature for you in the correct format.
Then, put it on your web-site at the address in the uri attribute. Any user on most Linux distributions (e.g. Ubuntu, Fedora, Debian, Gentoo, ArchLinux, etc) can then install and run your program with:
0launch http://mysite/myprog.xml
Their system will also check for updates periodically. There are various GUIs for the different desktop environments, but the command-line will work everywhere.
Also look at some of the existing feeds for inspiration.
I tell you an additional possibility, although I am not aware of its status: the Loki installer. Loki was a company doing videogames porting for Linux. It went down in 2002, but the installer is available.
InstallShield is also available for linux. No idea on the status though.
Although many people are proposing you to go with tar.gz, please don't. I assume you want to provide a pleasant experience for the installation procedure to your users. A tar.gz is one of the most low level, low quality, low usability choices you can do. It works everywhere because it does basically nothing, as you know.
The guys at freedesktop.org and the LSB are quite clear on where to put stuff. What you need is a friendly program to do that. Autopackage imho has the numbers (I love it), but despite its age, I haven't seen a single program out there distributed as an autopackage.
Evaluate it carefully, but don't skip the chance of being part of the momentum in favour of it, just because it's not popular. If it works for you, and it works for your users, everything else does not matter.
There is no best way (universally speaking).
tar.gz the binaries, that should work.
Today, I would also look at Snapcraft and Flatpak which are embraced by some popular distributions. I explored other options and it is what ended up working best for me. Flatpak in particular also helped me learn about standard Linux desktop conventions to follow.
You may also want to look at AppImage (https://appimage.org/). The concept is that it produces a single binary file that the user downloads, sets executable, and runs directly; no installation necessary, no dependencies to install (since the app image typically includes all the dependencies except basic stuff like glibc). This makes for a really great user experience!
Some downsides:
The image may be large, since it probably includes all files/libraries/... the app depends on.
As the image creator, you're responsible for security updates to any of the libraries you add into your image.
An AppImage is great for a user-run application that's pretty isolated from anything else on the system (i.e. daemons, system configuration, etc.), but if your app relies on things like udev integration, desktop file installation, dbus registration, etc. this isn't easy, since the apps files aren't available when the app isn't running (making udev rules hard), and there is by definition no installer that gets run (making desktop file installation hard).
I've also looked into this at work and I'd have to agree there really isn't a "best way". If your application is being distributed as source then I'd go with the make/configure methods packaged up in a tar.gz. That seems fairly universal in the Linux world.
A good way to get an idea of what to do is to look at larger organziation and see how they distribute their binaries.
I am developing cross-platform Qt application.
It is freeware though not open-source. Therefore I want to distribute it as a compiled binary.
On windows there is no problem, I pack my compiled exe along with MinGW's and Qt's DLLs and everything goes great.
But on Linux there is a problem because the user may have shared libraries in his/her system very different from mine.
Qt deployment guide suggests two methods: static linking and using shared libraries.
The first produces huge executable and also require static versions of many libraries which Qt depends on, i.e. I'll have to rebuild all of them from scratches. The second method is based on reconfiguring dynamic linker right before the application startup and seems a bit tricky to me.
Can anyone share his/her experience in distributing Qt applications under Linux? What method should I use? What problems may I confront with? Are there any other methods to get this job done?
Shared libraries is the way to go, but you can avoid using LD_LIBRARY_PATH (which involves running the application using a launcher shell script, etc) building your binary with the -rpath compiler flag, pointing to there you store your libraries.
For example, I store my libraries either next to my binary or in a directory called "mylib" next to my binary. To use this on my QMake file, I add this line in the .pro file:
QMAKE_LFLAGS += -Wl,-rpath,\\$\$ORIGIN/lib/:\\$\$ORIGIN/../mylib/
And I can run my binaries with my local libraries overriding any system library, and with no need for a launcher script.
You can also distribute Qt shared libraries on Linux. Then, get your software to load those instead of the system default ones. Shared libraries can be over-ridden using the LD_LIBRARY_PATH environment variable. This is probably the simplest solution for you. You can always change this in a wrapper script for your executable.
Alternatively, just specify the minimum library version that your users need to have installed on the system.
When we distribute Qt apps on Linux (or really any apps that use shared libraries) we ship a directory tree which contains the actual executable and associated wrapper script at the top with sub-directories containing the shared libraries and any other necessary resources that you don't want to link in.
The advantage of doing this is that you can have the wrapper script setup everything you need for running the application without having to worry about having the user set environment variables, install to a specific location, etc. If done correctly, this also allows you to not have to worry about from where you are calling the application because it can always find the resources.
We actually take this tree structure even further by placing all the executable and shared libraries in platform/architecture sub-directories so that the wrapper script can determine the local architecture and call the appropriate executable for that platform and set the environment variables to find the appropriate shared libraries. We found this setup to be particularly helpful when distributing for multiple different linux versions that share a common file system.
All this being said, we do still prefer to build statically when possible, Qt apps are no exception. You can definitely build with Qt statically and you shouldn't have to go build a lot of additional dependencies as krbyrd noted in his response.
sybreon's answer is exactly what I have done. You can either always add your libraries to LD_LIBRARY_PATH or you can do something a bit more fancy:
Setup your shipped Qt libraries one per directory. Write a shell script, have it run ldd on the executable and grep for 'not found', for each of those libraries, add the appropriate directory to a list (let's call it $LDD). After you have them all, run the binary with LD_LIBRARY_PATH set to it's previous value plus $LDD.
Finally a comment about "I'll have to rebuild all of them from scratches". No, you won't have to. If you have the dev packages for those libraries, you should have .a files, you can statically link against these.
Not an answer as such (sybreon covered that), but please note that you are not allowed to distribute your binary if it is statically linked against Qt, unless you have bought a commercial license, otherwise your entire binary falls under the GPL (or you're in violation of Qt's license.)
If you have a commercial license, never mind.
If you don't have a commercial license, you have two options:
Link dynamically against Qt v4.5.0 or newer (the LGPL versions - you may not use the previous versions except in open source apps), or
Open your source code.
The probably easiest way to create a Qt application package on Linux is probably linuxdeployqt. It collects all required files and lets you build an AppImage which runs on most Linux distributions.
Make sure you build the application on the oldest still-supported Ubuntu LTS release so your AppImage can be listed on AppImageHub.
You can look into QtCreator folder and use it as an example. It has qt.conf and qtcreator.sh files in QtCreator/bin.
lib/qtcreator is the folder with all needed Qt *.so libraries. Relative path is set inside qtcreator.sh, which should be renamed to you-app-name.sh
imports,plugins,qml are inside bin directory. Path to them is set in qt.conf file. This is needed for QML applications deployment.
This article has information on the topic. I will try it myself:
http://labs.trolltech.com/blogs/2009/06/02/deploying-a-browser-on-gnulinux/
In a few words:
Configure Qt with -platform linux-lsb-g++
Linking should be done
with –lsb-use-default-linker
Package everything and deploy (will
need a few tweaks here but I haven't yet tried it sorry)