/pyinstaller-many-linux

PyInstaller for Linux inside Docker using old glibc v2.5

Primary LanguageDockerfile

pyinstaller-many-linux

Docker image for pyinstaller, a static binary packager for python scripts (more informations on pyinstaller official website)

You should use this image, if you want to make your linux apps backward-compatible.

Regarding official documentation:

Under Linux, PyInstaller does not bundle libc (the C standard library, usually glibc, the Gnu version) with the app. Instead, the app expects to link dynamically to the libc from the local OS where it runs. The interface between any app and libc is forward compatible to newer releases, but it is not backward compatible to older releases.

For this reason, if you bundle your app on the current version of Linux, it may fail to execute (typically with a runtime dynamic link error) if it is executed on an older version of Linux.

The solution is to always build your app on the oldest version of Linux you mean to support. It should continue to work with the libc found on newer versions.

This Docker image provides a clean way to build PyInstaller apps in an isolated environment using old glibc v2.5 (so your script will be able to execute on many-many linux machines).

Basic Usage

  • Build the Docker image (it will take some time): 
    docker build -t pyinstaller-many-linux .
    or 
    make docker-build
  • Run the docker image, binding the data dir to the container's /code directory. This will compile your script (you can use any pyinstaller args here): 
    docker run --rm -v "${PWD}:/code" pyinstaller-many-linux --onefile example.py
  • You can now run the result from the ./dist directory: 
    ./dist/example

Customizing the build

The image is based on python 3.6, for now. But you can customize it.

  1. Download needed python version to the python-for-docker directory from here, before building a Docker image.
  2. Change the Dockerfile:
    • Change ARG PYTHON_VERSION=3.6 to the downloaded python version
    • Change COPY ./python-for-docker/Python-3.6.8.tgz /tmp/ to COPY ./python-for-docker/YOUR_FILE /tmp/
    • Change RUN tar xzvf /tmp/Python-3.6.8.tgz && cd Python-3.6.8 \ to RUN tar xzvf /tmp/YOUR_FILE && cd YOUR_FILE \
  3. Change PYTHON_VERSION=3.6 to the downloaded python version in the entrypoint.sh file.
  4. Build your image or you can use make docker-rebuild command.