using an alternate /tmp location with pyinstaller

Question

I have a Python script which I then ran through pyinstaller2.0 to generate its binary.

python pyinstaller -F /path/to/python/script

While running the binary, it uses the /tmp folder by default to save it's temporary files and run the installer. This works fine on normal servers and VPSes. However, when an install is attempted on a server where /tmp is disabled (/tmp noexec), the installation fails.

My questions are as follows:

• How would I enable another temporary location when the binary is run? does pyinstaller have such an option?
• If I write the code to create a temp location and export it to the PATH inside the python script, won't it anyway try to use default /tmp to run the python binary anyway?
• Another method I thought of was to write a shell script in bash which creates a temp location, exports its PATH, then calls the python binary and after it has run , remove the location of temp from PATH, and delete the temp folder - but this seems like a roundabout way to get it done. Is there a better solution?

Answer 1

Since PyInstaller V3.3 (2017-09-21) you can use the --runtime-tmpdir argument to change the default extracting path, i.e.:

--runtime-tmpdir PATH

Where to extract libraries and support files in onefile-mode. If this option is given, the bootloader will ignore any temp-folder location defined by the run-time OS. The _MEIxxxxxx-folder will be created here. Please use this option only if you know what you are doing.

Answer 2

The solution as suggested by @devnull was indeed to make changes in pyinstaller's script. The script had the temporary location hardcoded so I made changes there. So here are the steps followed:

• Under the pyinstaller folder, look for the launch.c file under /path/to/pyinstaller/sources/common
• Look for a function called int getTempPath(char *buff)
• Under it, delete references to the static const char *envname[] (which are, it's declaration and one for loop within the same function)
• Change the values for static const char *dirname[] to to the values which you want.

The function thus, looks like so:

int getTempPath(char *buff)
{
        static const char *dirname[] = {
                "/usr/local/src/temp", "/usr/local/src", "/usr/src", 0
        };
        int i;
        char *p;
        for ( i=0; dirname[i]; i++ ) {
                strcpy(buff, dirname[i]);
                if (testTempPath(buff))
                        return 1;
        }
    return 0;
}

Recompile the pyinstaller sources using the following command:

python ./waf configure --no-lsb build install

To run this, first install python-devel packages (yum install python-devel -y) else it throws and error that Python.h isn't found

Now when we run the python script through pyinstaller, the new temp local is used. Thanks to @devnull for pointing me in the right direction.