Accessing Pyinstaller bootloaded environment from spawned process

[JoeZiminski]

Thanks for all your work on this excellent installer.

We are trying to package a python application which spawns a terminal emulator (wezterm) and runs python from within it. The reason we are doing this is because we use textual for a terminal-based GUI, and not all terminals render correctly (e.g. cmd.exe).

Fundamentally my question is: How can a terminal spawned in a subprocess inherit the bootloaded environment such that commands in the terminal (e.g. python) work as expected.

A MRE is below, run simply within pyinstaller run_app.py (and then, for now, manually copying the folder _vendored containing the wezterm executable).

I was hoping based on this part of the documentation that when spawning a new terminal, it might inherit the bootloaded environment. Unfortunately this does not seem to be the case, for example executing python (or versioned variants of) is not recognised, similar to a terminal when opened in the usual windows environment through the windows GUI.

In this case, maybe it is necessary to perform these steps that pyinstaller performs in a new process (from this doc) to setup the environment?:

On Windows set the [activation context](http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/aa374153(v=vs.85).aspx).

Load the Python dynamic library. The name of the dynamic library is embedded in the executable file.

Initialize Python interpreter: set sys.path, sys.prefix, sys.executable.

Alternatively, it would be awesome if it was possible to specify which console is used by pyinstaller when the --console flag is set to True. Then we could run our python code directly in a terminal we know can support textual.

MRE:

import os
import subprocess

dir_path = os.path.dirname(os.path.realpath(__file__))
path_to_wezterm = "_vendored/wezterm/windows/wezterm.exe"

subprocess.Popen(
    f"{dir_path}/{path_to_wezterm}"
)

Thanks!

[bwoodsend]

Hmm, this whole bootloaded environment is a construct you've made up I'm afraid. A PyInstaller application is not a relocatable Python environment so no, it does not contain a python executable. If you're looking for an embedded Python then I suggest you use an embedded Python rather than PyInstaller.

[rokm]

As Brénainn already pointed out, PyInstaller-frozen application uses embedded python interpreter to run your application code, so you cannot use it from the outside of the application process.

Alternatively, it would be awesome if it was possible to specify which console is used by pyinstaller when the --console flag is set to True. Then we could run our python code directly in a terminal we know can support textual.

This is up to OS to decide, not the application (i.e., contemporary versions of Windows allow you to globally switch between Windows Terminal and old cmd.exe console for console applications). The best you can probably do is to set up a launcher shortcut that opens/runs wezterminal and instructs it to run your program executable; probably something like path/to/wezter.exe /start <path-to-program-exe>?).