Pyinstaller huge file size issue

Question

I have made I simple web-scraping script with some email sending, and tried to made it into .exe app using Pyinstaller, but I did not expect that the final size of the .exe version will be so huge, its around 360MB. I used this line to convert it into .exe in cmd -> pyinstaller --onefile scriptName.py

Is there any way how could I reduce the file size of the .exe file? Its literally just web-scrape script which is displaying scraped text on cmd.

my imports:

from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
import pandas as pd 
import time
import smtplib

Show us your code, especially the part of the imports. If you use packages like OpenCV, it might happen that it blows up in size, i assume. Also i advice not to use the --onefile flag if you can not bring down your package-size, to prevent long loading times. — mnikley, Nov 06 '21 at 17:19

score 0 · Accepted Answer · answered Nov 06 '21 at 18:11

I tested a minimal example based on your dependencies and just by using a few functions out of the imports i already got a package with 65 MB size. So i think it is pretty common that your package is that large. As far as i know, pyinstaller checks all your imports and used functions/classes from that modules and only includes those, so i am not sure if you can reduce the size any further without changing your code.

However, based on this post you should create the pyinstaller package from within a virtual environment which contains only the absolutely necessary packages. Furthermore, maybe you can try to eliminate unnecessary functions and try to re-use others.

Other than that, try packaging it without --onefile and pack it as a zip file afterwards, or even use Inno Setup to shrink your package size - there are tutorials out there how to use it. I achieved to get a package from i think ~600-700mb down to an installer of 150mb. However this requires some additional work and might not be what you want. This is the test-code i used for my 65mb pyinstaller package:

from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
import pandas as pd 
import time
import smtplib

soup = BeautifulSoup("<p>Some<b>bad<i>HTML")
print(soup.prettify())

def some_function():
    print("Starting function")
    time.sleep(1)
    print("Ending function")

some_function()


try:
    with smtplib.SMTP("domain.org") as smtp:
        smtp.noop()
        print("Did something with smtplib.SMTP")
except:
    print("Couldnt connect via smtplib")

mydataset = {
  'cars': ["BMW", "Volvo", "Ford"],
  'passings': [3, 7, 2]
}

myvar = pd.DataFrame(mydataset)

print(myvar)

Pyinstaller huge file size issue

1 Answers1