python: can executable zip files include data files?

Question

Being fairly new to python I only recently discovered the ability to directly execute a .zip file by placing a __main__.py file at the top of the file. This works great for python code, but can I bundle other types of files and access them with my scripts? If so, how?

My ultimate goal would be to bundle some image files along with the python code in a single .zip file, then be able to use those images within the app without having to extract them to disk. I also would like to bundle a copyright notice, release notes, etc so that the entire app and its data files is in a single zip that can be executed without having to extract it somewhere.

Answer 1

You could use pkg_resources functions to access files:

# __main__.py import pkg_resources from PIL import Image  print pkg_resources.resource_string(__name__, 'README.txt')  im = Image.open(pkg_resources.resource_stream('app', 'im.png')) im.rotate(45).show() 

Where zipfile contains:

. |-- app |   |-- im.png |   `-- __init__.py |-- README.txt `-- __main__.py

To make zipfile executable, run:

$ echo '#!/usr/bin/env python' | cat - zipfile > program-name $ chmod +x program-name 

To test it:

$ cp program-name /another-dir/ $ cd /another-dir && ./program-name