I'm looking to create a cross-platform executable of my commandline application. The application is using poetry as the package manager, and I'm running this on MacOS.
First we need to install PyInstaller:
$ poetry add pyinstaller --dev
Then it should be as simple as running the following:
$ poetry shell<br></br>$ pyinstaller --onefile app/app.py
### Macho Libre
However, this resulted in the following error:
`ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'macholib'`
> macholib can be used to analyze and edit Mach-O headers, the executable format used by Mac OS X.
>
> It’s typically used as a dependency analysis tool, and also to rewrite dylib references in Mach-O headers to be @executable\_path relative.
Manually adding this dependency to the project addresses this:
`$ poetry add macholib --dev`
### NLTK
However, now calling pyinstaller again throws up a new error:
`Unable to find "nltk_data" when adding binary and data files.`
> NLTK is a leading platform for building Python programs to work with human language data. It provides easy-to-use interfaces to over 50 corpora and lexical resources such as WordNet, along with a suite of text processing libraries for classification, tokenization, stemming, tagging, parsing, and semantic reasoning, wrappers for industrial-strength NLP libraries \[...\].
Fortunately we can download the missing data as follows (from within the poetry shell):
$ python<br></br>>>> import nltk<br></br>>>> nltk.download()
Press the **download** button on the window that pops up and make sure the installation path matches the error message path.
Then fix the path to NLTK in PyInstaller according to [this StackOverflow answer](https://stackoverflow.com/a/57130036/997). To get to the right location, ask poetry:
$ poetry env list --full-path<br></br>$ cd <path>/lib/python3.7/site-packages/PyInstaller/hooks
Rerunning the pyinstaller command after this produced an executable! However it's 1.2GB, propably due to including the macholib library.
I will update this post when I've figured this out.