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Suppose I have a minimal PyInstaller spec file, e.g. the hello_world.spec that is created when I run pyinstaller hello_world.py (also see docs). This spec file has python code but no import statements.

Now suppose I customize this file, e.g. using the Tree and TOC classes, but something is going wrong and I need to find out what.

I am aware of the PyInstaller --log-level options and warn*.txt files, but I would prefer to place some break-points in my IDE and debug the spec file (or maybe just play around with the Tree class in the console). However, debugging does not work out-of-the-box because there are no import statements in the spec file. I can add those, as below, for example:

from PyInstaller.building.build_main import Analysis, PYZ, EXE, COLLECT
from PyInstaller.building.datastruct import TOC, Tree

But then it turns out some configuration info is required, as I keep running into KeyErrors related to CONF. I tried adding those key/value-pairs manually, based on a list of globals from the docs, which appears to work, up to a point, but I cannot help thinking I'm doing something wrong...

import PyInstaller.config
PyInstaller.config.CONF['specnm'] = 'hello_world'
... etc. ...

Could someone tell me what is the right way to do this? Should I just stick with the pyinstaller --log-level approach?

djvg
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2 Answers2

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A couple of years later, still no answer, so here's one alternative I came up with:

One approach is to use unittest.mock.Mock to mock the PyInstaller classes that are not relevant for the problem at hand.

For example, my spec file has some custom code that generates some of the values passed into the Analysis class. In order to debug that code, I just mock out all the PyInstaller classes and run the spec file, using runpy.run_path from the standard library, as follows:

from runpy import run_path
from unittest.mock import Mock

mocks = dict(Analysis=Mock(), EXE=Mock(), PYZ=Mock(), COLLECT=Mock())
run_path(path_name="path/to/my.spec", init_globals=mocks)

This is also very useful to extract the values of arguments defined in the spec file. For example, we can extract the name value passed into EXE() as follows:

exe_name = mocks["EXE"].call_args.kwargs["name"]
djvg
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Found this unresolved thread, I found that putting an old style Python breakpoint in the spec file works with Pyinstaller 4.8:

...
import pdb; pdb.set_trace()
...
Adriano
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