How can I share my python scripts with my less python-savvy business person partner?

Question

I'm taking financial mathematics as an elective, and I'm working with real life finance industry worker type people. It's actually kind of fun. When I pulled out a macbook at one of our meetings, I had four lifelong windows users look at me like I had three heads.

Anyway, I'm helping with design and simulation of our trading strategy, and I wrote a little thing using matplotlib to visualize historical stock data. However, these guys don't know how to use git, or install python, or deal with path-related package management things. I need to be able to send my scripts to them to use, and I need to do it with absolutely minimal effort on their part.

I was thinking something on the lines of py2exe, but I'd like to hear some advice before I go ahead.

• James Anderson: What are the other guys using WIndows, Macs , *nix ?
• Micro: with a little bit of pragmatism i can suggest to you the making of a very short vid where you show how to do what it's necessary to run your stuff. Just record a desktop and send them the vid.

Answer 1

For windows there are complete distributions available as an installable ".exe" from python.org and an even more complete distribution from "ActiveState".

Although they are enormous the installation pretty much windows standard: download the file, double click on the .exe and agree to everything that pops up.

An alternative would be to wrap your script in "cherryPy" or similar web server and let them access your application via http.

Answer 2

You have two problems: * How do I get my program in the hands of others? * How do I write programs that can run outside my own machine?

You can publicize the program using DropBox, which gives you a folder you can copy files to, and then are made available on a web page where you can email others the URL. Very easy to use on a daily basis.

The "how can I make Python programs run outside my machine" depends on how much you can assume being available on the target computers, and it seems you cannot rely on anything else than stock Windows. This mean you will need to let your users either have a very easy download/install of the runtime, or you will need to carry the runtime with you in your program. This might prove to be quite troublesome - have you considered rewriting your program in e.g. .NET (using Mono) or Java, both which have portability in mind?

Answer 3

The best portable way is using web. You can use wsgi to make your script accessible from web. So they can access from all platforms.