Creating Built Distributions

A “built distribution” is what you’re probably used to thinking of either as a “binary package” or an “installer” (depending on your background). It’s not necessarily binary, though, because it might contain bytecode. (And “installer” is a term specific to the world of mainstream desktop systems.)

A built distribution is how you make life as easy as possible for installers of your module distribution: for users of RPM-based Linux systems, it’s a binary RPM; for Windows users, it’s an executable installer; for Debian-based Linux users, it’s a Debian package; and so forth.

The available commands for built distributions are:

Command

Description

Notes

bdist_appimage

AppImage application bundle (.AppImage)

(1)

bdist_deb

DEB distribution (.deb)

(2) (3)

bdist_dmg

DMG disk image (.dmg)

bdist_mac

Mac application bundle (.app)

bdist_msi

Windows installer (.msi)

bdist_rpm

RPM distribution (.rpm)

(3)

Added in version 7.0: Support for the bdist_appimage and bdist_deb commands.

Note

  1. requires external AppImageKit (the latest version is downloaded if not specified or not found).

  2. requires external alien and fakeroot utilities.

  3. requires external rpm utility, version 3.0.4 or better (use rpm --version to find out which version you have).