pyinstaller is not compatible with python argparse -h

Question

In the python script, ArgumentParser will displays the parser’s help message by default if -h or --help is supplied at the command line.

(base) D:\Study\Github\BVPA-GUI>python src\plot_auto.py -h                         
usage: plot_auto.py [-h] [--legend] [--figname FIGNAME]

optional arguments:
  -h, --help         show this help message and exit
  --legend           Show legend on plot.
  --figname FIGNAME  Specify the window title.

However it will not work if I compile the python script into exe application by pyinstaller.

D:\Study\Github\BVPA-GUI>.\bin\plotting\plot_auto.exe -h

What is the reason for this and what can I do about this？

Answer 1

Have you ever used sys.argv with pyinstaller? You can check that it works well.

See argparse python official document, especially parse_args parts. It makes a parsed arguments with the given console arguments or the given string list on function interface, parse_args(['arg1', 'arg2', ... ]).

Let's apply to your application. Very simple.

import sys, argparse

parser = argparse.ArgumentParser()

# add arguments settings ------------
 .
 .
 .
#------------------------------------

if __name__ == "__main__":
    args = parser.parse_args(sys.argv[1:])
    # Your program code

I also tried same work with you.

It worked well to me.

I hope it is usefull to you too.

#Note: In the official document said that parse_args function get default arguments from sys.argv but it doesn't seems to work with pyinstaller. The above is just manually add such progress.