Making your own Custom-Python-Executable

Define your own python executable extension and convert your simple python code to an executable application very easily. Make sure you have python.exe on your computer. I have used my python scripts as executables previously and while pyinstaller worked just fine initially, somehow later a few dependencies weren’t met and the exe kept crashing. I tried a few alternatives including py2exe and the like but I couldn’t just use them for a long time back then. I stumbled upon ways to define our own executable and thought of putting it out here. Hope this helps someone.

The following steps need to be executed in the cmd with Administrator privileges

Step 1:

ASSOC .myexe=PythonScriptExecutable

ASSOC is a command that displays the program and/or functionality ASSOCiated with a specific file type.

• This associates your own extension to a future path to be an executable (both chosen by you). Here for demo purposes I let:
• .myexe be my extension, and
• PythonScriptExecutable be used to set a python.exe in the next step

Step 2:

FTYPE .myexe=PythonScriptExecutable=path/to/your/python.exe %1 %*

FTYPE is used to display or change the link between a file type and an executable program.

• The %1 %* is a modifier to match the arguments we are passing to the cmd prompt, please do not miss that out.
• In case you aren’t sure about your python installation location, run the following code in a .py file and it will give you your python’s location.

import sys print(sys.prefix)

Suppose it returns "C://Programs//SomeFolder//python.exe" then simply change the // with \ i.e. C:\Programs\SomeFolder\python.exe and use this path in step up replacing it with "path/to/your/python.exe". This needs to be done for Windows users, also since python interpreter considers / as a special character and thus uses // to escape it.

Step 3

set PATHEXT=%PATHEXT%;.myexec

And voila!
You just defined .myexec as your custom python executable. Now all you need to do is write some python code and save it as filename.myexec Then simply clicking on the file it will run automatically like any other executable. You can run it from the command prompt and also give parameters.