TKinter application runs perfectly fine in Visual Studio Code but crashes as an .exe

Question

I have a TKinter application which i put together in Visual Studio Code. It runs perfectly fine in Visual Studio Code and does not freeze or anything like that. Because I want my program to run on other pcs as well, I created an .exe file using pyinstaller by running

pyinstaller --onefile -w "main.py"

This creates the desired .exe file without any problems. Sadly when put into an .exe file, my program crashes a lot, by crashing I mean that the window is not responding anymore or that the window just closes itself after some time. I don't know if this is a commom problem but I honestly don't know what to do. Apparently I don't have any problems in my code, because it runs perfectly fine in Visual Studio Code.

Is there anything I can do?

Edit 1: My window freezes around these lines of my code: I am trying to create 4 scales with a for loop:

for i in range(4):
    scale = tk.Scale(self.root, state = "disabled", from_ = 100, to = 0)
    scale.place(rely=0.2,relx=i*0.25,relwidth=0.25, relheight=0.8)
    self.scales.append(scale)

Also I try to put my scales into the list self.scales so I can work with my scales later on. The program creates the first three scales without any problem but often fails to create the 4th.

EDIT 2: I think I found a solution: Maybe the for loop is just too fast for Tkinter and it can't create the GUI items that fast, I added

time.sleep(0.1)

to my for loop, for now, this seems to work. But I dont really know if thats how its supposed to be.

EDIT 3: Nevermind, this did not solve the problem. The problem has something to do with creating the scales. I dont really know what to do.

Answer 1

Check out Logging, and the tutorial that comes with. After formatting to write to a file, you can put a few logging.info() here and there which can help determine the root cause of your error.

import logging

logging.basicConfig(filename='log.txt',
                    filemode='a',
                    format='%(asctime)s %(message)s',
                    datefmt='%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S',
                    level=logging.INFO)

def my_func(x, y):

    logging.info('Accessing Function: my_func()')

    z = x + y

    logging.info(f'Function myfunc() Successfully Completed, Variable Values: {x}, {y}, {z}')


my_func(2, 7)

Now you have a handy log.txt file which you can diagnose.

EDIT

Using the lines of code you provided, I tried out the following:

import tkinter as tk


class Application(tk.Frame):
    def __init__(self, root=None):
        super().__init__(root)
        self.root = root
        self.root.geometry('720x450')
        self.pack()
        self.scales = []
        self.create_scale()

    def create_scale(self):
        for i in range(4):
            scale = tk.Scale(self.root, state="disabled", from_=100, to=0)
            scale.place(rely=0.2, relx=i*0.25, relwidth=0.25, relheight=0.8)
            self.scales.append(scale)


gui = tk.Tk()
app = Application(root=gui)
app.mainloop()

I made an exe with PyInstaller 4.1, Python 3.9 and all four scales are properly produced on my screen so the problem isn't with those specific lines of code but how they interact with the rest of your code.

I can try finding out the root of your problem but I would need to see your full code or a minimal, reproducible example that successfully mimics the same problem you have.