Development

Getting started

cx_Freeze is a volunteer maintained open source project and we welcome contributions of all forms. The sections below will help you get started with development, testing, and documentation. We’re pleased that you are interested in working on cx_Freeze. This document is meant to get you setup to work on cx_Freeze and to act as a guide and reference to the development setup. If you face any issues during this process, please open an issue about it on the issue tracker.

Setup

The source code can be found on Github .

Note

  1. It is recommended to use a virtual environment.

  2. Please check the requirements for python on your system (see Python requirements).

You can use git to clone the repository:

git clone https://github.com/marcelotduarte/cx_Freeze
cd cx_Freeze
make install

If you don’t have make installed, run:

python -m pip install --upgrade pip
pip install -e .[dev,doc]
prek install --install-hooks --overwrite -t pre-commit

To build wheel locally, run:

make wheel

Building documentation

cx_Freeze’s documentation is built using Sphinx . The documentation is written in reStructuredText. To build it locally, run:

make html

The built documentation can be found in the build/doc/html folder and may be viewed by opening index.html within that folder.

make htmltest

Conda-forge

If you are installing a pre-release or from sources, install the requirements using the conda-forge channel:

python
py-lief     #  Windows
dmgbuild    #  macOS
patchelf    #  Linux
# declare SDKROOT or CONDA_BUILD_SYSROOT (not required in Github Actions)

An example for Linux:

git clone https://github.com/marcelotduarte/cx_Freeze
cd cx_Freeze
conda create -n cx313conda -c conda-forge python=3.13 -y
conda activate cx313conda
conda install -c conda-forge patchelf -y
conda install -c conda-forge --file=requirements-dev.txt
prek install --install-hooks --overwrite -t pre-commit
pip install -e. --no-deps --no-build-isolation

Note

pip should be used in conda only in development mode.

Contributing

Submitting pull requests

Submit pull requests against the main branch providing a good description of what you are doing and why. You must have legal permission to distribute any code you contribute to cx_Freeze and it must be available under the PSF License. Any pull request should consider that it needs to work on supported platforms.

Pull Requests should be small to facilitate review. Keep them self-contained, and limited in scope. Studies have shown that review quality falls off as patch size grows. Sometimes this will result in many small PRs to land a single large feature. In particular, pull requests must not be treated as “feature branches”, with ongoing development work within the PR. Instead, the feature should be broken up into smaller, independent parts which can be reviewed and merged individually.

Additionally, avoid including “cosmetic” changes to code that are unrelated to your change, as these make reviewing the PR more difficult. Examples include re-flowing text in comments or documentation or adding or removing blank lines or whitespace within lines. Such changes can be made separately, as a “formatting cleanup” PR as required.

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