Creating a binary damage

This page will be only of interest to those deciding to build their own application from the source code. For most users, this is unnecessary and the damage console utility can be downloaded from the Github releases page.

Note that you need Python and fcheck to do this, and once you do that, you can already invoke damage.py. So this is only necessary if you want to make a binary distribution that you want to give to someone else.

Not everyone has a Python installation on their computer, and even if they do, they don’t necessarily know how to use it. As damage is supposed to be simple to use, the easiest way to use it is as a traditional application. This means it needs to be compiled or packaged into, ideally, a single file.

Users most likely to require a custom binary version of damage are:

  • Linux users, because the distribution version may not function on their systems
  • Mac users who are using machines with M1 processors
  • Users with ARM chips or other uncommon system architecture

To perform these steps, you will need [PyInstaller] along with an installed version of Python >= v3.6. Although these examples use absolute paths, that’s not technically required. You can install PyInstaller the usual way with pip. ie. pip install PyInstaller

Building with Pyinstaller

Depending on your Python installation, you may need to build with a virtual environment (which you should probably do anyway).

Damage doesn’t have a lot of dependencies; you really only need pyreadstat, which installs pandas and numpy as dependencies.

or, as the output of pip freeze:

altgraph==0.17
importlib-metadata==4.0.1
macholib==1.14
numpy==1.20.2
pandas==1.2.4
pyinstaller==4.3
pyinstaller-hooks-contrib==2021.1
pyreadstat==1.1.0
python-dateutil==2.8.1
pytz==2021.1
six==1.15.0
typing-extensions==3.10.0.0
zipp==3.4.1

pyinstaller -F --additional-hooks-dir ./  --hidden-import pyreadstat._readstat_writer --hidden-import pandas --hidden-import pyreadstat.worker --hidden-import multiprocessing /path/to/damage.py

Alternately, you can simplify the PyInstaller command by using the py_install/hook-fcheck.py file:

pyinstaller -F --additional-hooks-dir=/path/to/py_install  /path/to/damage.py

This process will create a damage.spec file along with a build and a dist dir. Inside the dist dir will be your self-contained file, which you can do with as you like.

Normally, on MacOS and linux system, the resultant damage file is placed in /usr/local/bin and for Windows computers, the damage.exe file is placed somewhere on you system PATH.