zipapp - python: can executable zip files include data files?

Question

Being fairly new to python I only recently discovered the ability to directly execute a .zip file by placing a __main__.py file at the top of the file. This works great for python code, but can I bundle other types of files and access them with my scripts? If so, how?

My ultimate goal would be to bundle some image files along with the python code in a single .zip file, then be able to use those images within the app without having to extract them to disk. I also would like to bundle a copyright notice, release notes, etc so that the entire app and its data files is in a single zip that can be executed without having to extract it somewhere.

Answer 1

You could use pkg_resources functions to access files:

# __main__.py
import pkg_resources
from PIL import Image

print pkg_resources.resource_string(__name__, 'README.txt')

im = Image.open(pkg_resources.resource_stream('app', 'im.png'))
im.rotate(45).show()

Where zipfile contains:

.
|-- app
|   |-- im.png
|   `-- __init__.py
|-- README.txt
`-- __main__.py

To make zipfile executable, run:

$ echo '#!/usr/bin/env python' | cat - zipfile > program-name
$ chmod +x program-name

To test it:

$ cp program-name /another-dir/
$ cd /another-dir && ./program-name