Creating your own Damage app

This page will be only of interest to those deciding to build their own application from the source code, most likely because their processor (like ARM or M1) is not supported. For most users, this is unnecessary and Damage can be downloaded from the Github releases page.

The Damage GUI application, unlike the console program, isn’t included when installing fcheck, either using pip or from the source code itself.

Because the Damage app uses tkinter, there are a number of problems that can arise, notably on Mac computers. Should you want to build the app, here are some guidelines on how to go about it.

  • The build process doesn’t use the same Python version as the fcheck module and the console utility. You will note in setup.py that it says python_requires:'>=3.6'. THIS IS NOT (NECESSARILY) TRUE FOR BUILDING THE GUI APP, notably on Mac computers, due to issues with tkinter. The app was built using Python 3.10.2 on Mac.

  • Building the app requires the installation of PyInstaller and PySimpleGUI, as well as the installation of fcheck

Procedure

Windows and Linux computers

For Windows and Linux, the easiest way is to build using the included PyInstaller .spec file. Change to the gui directory and run

python3 -m PyInstaller --clean --noconfirm damage_gui_combined.spec

If you don’t want to use the premade .spec file:

python3 -m PyInstaller --onefile --additional-hooks-dir ../py_install/ --name Damage --clean --noconfirm [any additional options go here] src/damage_gui.py

Note that for Windows and Linux, any version of Python >=3.6 should suffice, unlike for Mac computers.

The resultant application will be in the dist directory; place it wherever you like,

MacOS

For Mac computers, you can technically use the same procedure as above. However, it’s a bit redunant for Mac, as there’s no real reason to create the --onefile --windowed version as Mac apps are, by default, directories anyway.

The solution is to run PyInstaller without those options, editing the resulting plist file.

That is, in the source directory, run PyiInstaller, where python310 is the path to your Python 3.10 or higher Python

python310 -m PyInstaller --add-binary='/System/Library/Frameworks/Tk.framework/Tk':'tk' --add-binary='/System/Library/Frameworks/Tcl.framework/Tcl':'tcl' --additional-hooks-dir ../py_install/ --icon=assets/DamageAppIcon.icns --osx-bundle-identifier=ca.ubc.library --target-arch=x86_64 --noconsole --clean --noconfirm --name Damage src/damage_gui.py

And then,

from the same directory:

python310 customize_pyinstaller_plist.py

Once that is completed, there will be Mac app bundle in dist which doesn’t require unpacking at runtime. The completed app bundle can then be placed into DMG container for distribution, if required.