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Esky, is again unmaintained. I would reccomend trying pyinstaller and pyupdater It seems to be the king.

There are some useful modules here such as the functions to get admin access. These could be made reusable for other projects.

I would also like to encourage people to collaborate instead of always spin off new libraries. Why do we have 4 actively maintained freezers for python????

Esky - keep frozen apps fresh

Esky is an auto-update framework for frozen Python applications. It provides a simple API through which apps can find, fetch and install updates, and a bootstrapping mechanism that keeps the app safe in the face of failed or partial updates. Updates can also be sent as differential patches.

Esky is currently capable of freezing apps with py2exe, py2app, cxfreeze and bbfreeze. Adding support for other freezer programs should be easy; patches will be gratefully accepted.

We are tested and running on Python 2.7 Py2app will work on python3 fine, the other freezers not so much.

Current Limitations

Cannot sign the bootstrap executable
Doesn't work with windows resources
cxfreeze and py2exe not working on python3
Only support cxfreeze 4

For some workarounds to common issues check out the wiki

Installation

The simplest way to install esky is

pip install esky

To install the latest development branch you can install directly from github with

git clone git@github.com:cloudmatrix/esky.git

pip install -e esky

To uninstall the development version do python setup.py develop --uninstall

Usage

Freezing your app with esky requires small some modification to a setup.py file and then adding the Esky class to your program. When you are ready just run python setup.py bdist_esky This will produce a zip file which can automatically update as long as the structure is kept in tact.

The tutorial will guide you through setting up and freezing with esky. (get the files by cloning)
We have an F.A.Q as well as Documentation in our wiki
Ryan has done a talk at Pycon to help you get started: Keep your frozen app fresh
There is also a wrapper for esky in the gui library wxpthon, see blog post

Features

Pull updates from a http server or amazon s3 bucket (easily extendable)
Bootstrap Executable to prevent corruption in failed updates (can be compiled to ~1mb using Rpython)
Differential Patching (minor updates and fixes can be < 10kb)
py2exe, py2app, cxfreeze