In my application if I import those modules and print them to see the path of the module, it points to the packaged folder, but the modules are not there, yet it works.
I’m assuming your modules are pure Python (.py suffix - no C extensions or DLLs)? Python code doesn’t just get copied into your build folder. It is precompiled to .pyc, collected into a big zip archive which then is embedded directly into the .exe file. You won’t be able to see it but if you build in --onedir mode then navigate inside the output, you’ll find a file called base-library.zip. This is also a zip archive of precompiled Python code except this one only contains some of the standard library (don’t ask me why this one’s separate). Precompiling and zipping reduces the program size and speeds up initialisation just because there are less disk operations involved (Windows in particular is slow at handling lots of tiny files). But not everything can be lumped into a big zip archive. DLLs, including Python extension modules (.pyd) don’t work zipped and have to be copied in as is, which is why you will likely see parts of libraries inside your programs but nothing ending in .py. Data files, whilst they could sometimes be compressed in theory, are also just copied in as is. PyInstaller sets the __file__ attribute for Python files to point to where the .py file would have gone if it wasn’t put in the fancy zip archive. This way, even though __file__ itself doesn’t exist, the path to a data file derived from __file__ should, so it’s still possible for most libraries to locate their data files using __file__. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "PyInstaller" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to pyinstaller+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/pyinstaller/7d2d9ce1-e003-4df6-baeb-7ea0be29f13an%40googlegroups.com.
