python cx_Freeze askopenfile

Question

Following file (Python 3.7) does everything it is supposed to do. When I press the “Open file” button it opens “askopenfilename” dialog.

import tkinter as tk
from tkinter import ttk
from tkinter import filedialog as fd
from tkinter import messagebox
from os import path

class GUI(tk.Tk):
    def __init__(self):
        self.win=tk.Tk()
        self.create_widgets()

    def exitfcn(self):
        result = tk.messagebox.askquestion('Warning', 'Exit?')      
        if result == 'yes':
            self.win.destroy()

    # Button callback
    def getFileName(self):
        self.fDir = path.dirname(__file__)
        self.fname=fd.askopenfilename(parent=self.win, initialdir=self.fDir)
        if self.fname != '':
            self.getFile(self.fname)

    def getFile(self, file):
        print(self.fname)

    def create_widgets(self):
        self.mainButtons=ttk.Frame(self.win)
        self.mainButtons.grid(column=0, row=0, padx=100, pady=200)

        # Adding a Button - Open file
        self.openFilebtn=ttk.Button(self.mainButtons, text='Open file', command=self.getFileName)
        self.openFilebtn.grid(column=0, row=0, padx=10, pady=20)

        # Adding a Button - Exit
        self.exitbtn=ttk.Button(self.mainButtons, text='Exit', command=self.exitfcn)
        self.exitbtn.grid(column=0, row=1)

gui = GUI()
gui.win.mainloop()

When I use cx_Freeze (5.1.1) with following setup file:

import os
import sys
from tkinter import filedialog
from cx_Freeze import setup, Executable

PYTHON_INSTALL_DIR = os.path.dirname(os.path.dirname(os.__file__))
os.environ['TCL_LIBRARY'] = os.path.join(PYTHON_INSTALL_DIR, 'tcl', 'tcl8.6')
os.environ['TK_LIBRARY'] = os.path.join(PYTHON_INSTALL_DIR, 'tcl', 'tk8.6')

build_exe_options={
        'packages':['tkinter', 'tkinter.filedialog', 'os'],
        'include_files':[
        os.path.join(PYTHON_INSTALL_DIR, 'DLLs', 'tcl86t.dll'),
        os.path.join(PYTHON_INSTALL_DIR, 'DLLs', 'tk86t.dll'),]
            }

base = None
if sys.platform == 'win32':
    base = 'Win32GUI'

executables=[Executable("dialog_test.py", base=base)]

setup(name='dialog_test',
version=0.1,
description='Test file for cx_Freezer',
options={"build_exe": build_exe_options},
executables=executables
)

“Exit” button works, “Open file” button doesn’t open “askopenfilename” dialog. Where can be the problem?

Answer 1

As an alternative you could try using pyinstaller instead of cx_freeze to create the frozen application. When I freeze your script with pyinstaller, it creates a frozen application with a properly working file-open dialog.

You can install the pyinstaller package through pip:

pip install pyinstaller

and afterwards you can create the frozen application with just the command:

pyinstaller dialog_test.py