[rented_mule]

JavaScript has module bundlers that will merge all your code modules into one module for deployment. It's a little surprising nobody (that I'm aware of) has done this for Python and PEP 723 dependency specifications. Then the single binary for uv is all that's required to run the bundle using this type of approach, at least on unix-ish machines (not sure if there's a trick to make this work on Windows): https://docs.astral.sh/uv/guides/scripts/#using-a-shebang-to...

[ptx]

Python lets you bundle all the modules in a zip file and run that (no third-party tools needed): https://docs.python.org/3/library/zipapp.html

[0cf8612b2e1e]

That’s not a bad idea. uvx feels like a temporary hack on which I can’t rely for a permanent deployment, but it is all probably fine. I would want to at least materialize a real environment so I know that it is not getting randomly deleted as cache/temp gets cleared.

Unfortunately, it’s still not my ideal use case of distributing executables to Windows machines. I really want a single artifact users could freely share without any pre-configuration. I guess I could have a batch/vbs script which would bootstrap uv plus the rest of the machinery, but that is more moving parts than I would like.

[fragmede]

pyexe and pyinstaller let you just ship an exe to run

[quietbritishjim]

They just unzip the Python executable and your source files to a temporary directory and run them from there (although they are a convenient way of doing that).

nuitka is a bit better (in the sense of not running executables from a temporary path) in that it really compiles your code into an executable in "standalone" mode.