unattended install of binary python packages (modules) for windows

Question

Is there no sane way to peform a scripted install of binary python packages for windows? Unfortunately it seems like several essential windows python packages like pywin32 and py2exe are only available as EXE's not MSI's (and as far as I know only the latter are scriptable). Easy_install/pip also seems no use since they apparently only find source packages and then try to compile locally which is obviously unsatisfactory.

Am I missing something?

Answer 1

You can download the source code of pywin32 at sourceforge.net/projects/pywin32/files/ and then build it as MSI file yourself. Therefore you need setuptools (only for building). Use the command "setup.py bdist_msi" to create a MSI installer in the "dist" directory.

The same procedure should work for all Windows-compatible packages.

Answer 2

Current easy_install can install the pre-build ".exe" installers silently, i.e.;

C:\Python27\Scripts\easy_install.exe pywin32-220.win32-py2.7.exe

will install pywin32.

This also enables possibility to remove using pip;

pip uninstall pywin32 -y

uninstalls pywin32