pyinstaller seems not to find a data file

Question

Edit 3: I replaced __file__ with sys.argv[0], when I need to know the location of my script/executable. This is not exactly the same, but in my case it seems to run fine (at least on executable version...). Now everything is working fine, in one-file mode, with use of accepted answer's function to access resource files!

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Edit 2: as shown in accepted answer's comments, problem is coming from path resolution in my script; I try to use __file__ to get the location of the script, so that I can access to its resource files. This does not work once packaged, as __file__ will return filename from Python.dll to the script, so quite always no path and just a file name. So I have to find another trick to make access to resource files; a work-around for the moment is to move current directory to the executable path.

By the way, this means that the ConfigParser should report problem when accessing the file, and not that a section is missing.

I'll update this question with the way I resolved this path resolution question.

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I've got problems with pyinstaller, and as it's the first time I'm using it, it's sure that I've done something wrong.

So, here's the problem: pyisntaller runs smoothly on a script I wrote, and generates some stuff in dist folder. Ok, so now I want to execute it to see if all went well, and here's what I get:

C:\Program Files\PyInstaller\pyinstaller-1.5.1>p_tool\dist\p_tool\p_tool.exe -?
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<string>", line 104, in <module>
  File "p_tool\build\pyi.win32\p_tool\outPYZ1.pyz/logging.config", line 76, in f
ileConfig
  File "p_tool\build\pyi.win32\p_tool\outPYZ1.pyz/logging.config", line 112, in
_create_formatters
  File "p_tool\build\pyi.win32\p_tool\outPYZ1.pyz/ConfigParser", line 532, in ge
t
ConfigParser.NoSectionError: No section: 'formatters'

My first idea was that the logging.conf file was missing, so I added it (and some other resource files) in the p_tool.spec file, but this is not better.

Python version: 2.6.6, under WinXP. I'm using pyinstaller as I will need it to package files for a Solaris workstation.

So, anyone did have this problem? The only topic related is the following question: PyInstaller Problem, really close to my problem, but hopelessly it got no answer.

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Edit3: details about logging removed, as not really related to the problem.

Answer 1

Firstly, it might be wise to do a print config_file / os.path.exists(config_file) before reading it, so you can be sure where the file is and if python can find it.

As to actually accessing it, os.path.split(__file__) looks almost correct, but I'm not sure it works properly under pyinstaller - the proper way of packing files is to add them to the .spec file, pyinstaller will then load them at compile time and unpack them to $_MEIPASS2/ at run time. To get the _MEIPASS2 dir in packed-mode and use the local directory in unpacked (development) mode, I use this:

def resource_path(relative):
    return os.path.join(
        os.environ.get(
            "_MEIPASS2",
            os.path.abspath(".")
        ),
        relative
    )


# in development
>>> resource_path("logging.conf")
"/home/shish/src/my_app/logging.conf"

# in deployment
>>> resource_path("logging.conf")
"/tmp/_MEI34121/logging.conf"