How to Bundle Dynamic Libraries and Their Resources

[WSH032]

Hi Tauri developers, I am working on integrating pytauri with tauri-cli (WSH032/pytauri#2). To achieve this, I need to embed the Python interpreter into the executable, which requires the executable to link with the Python dynamic library. Therefore, I need to bundle and distribute a portable Python.

Here are the Python dependencies I bundled and their file layouts:

• Windows:

  ├── python3.dll
  ├── python.exe
  ├── ...
  

• Linux:

  ├── bin
  │   ├── python
  │   └── ...
  ├── lib
  │   ├── libpython3.so
  │   └── ...
  ├── share
  │   └── ...
  └── include
      └── ...
  

• Apple: Layout is similar to Linux

---

For Windows, it's easy. Just place the executable pytauri-demo.exe in the root directory, like this:

├── python3.dll
├── python.exe
├── pytauri-demo.exe  <--

It seems that I can use bundleresources to achieve this?

---

But for Unix, I need to place the executable in /bin and set the dynamic library search path via rpath=$ORIGIN/../lib:

├── bin
│   ├── python
│   ├── pytauri-demo  <--
│   └── ...
├── lib
│   ├── libpython3.so
│   └── ...
├── share
│   └── ...
└── include
    └── ...

I don't know how to configure tauri-cli to achieve this layout. Do you have any suggestions?

Or is there a better way than rpath? My Unix experience is very limited, and I know nothing about Unix packaging (rpm, appimage, deb).

It seems that AppImage can bundle dependencies? Can we use it to bundle the portable Python I mentioned?

[BjornTheProgrammer]

You have a few options here probably. 1) Use a resource directory, in which you manually add the Python interpreter you want to use. 2) Use something like pyembed to build and embed a CPython instance. This has a few drawbacks, namely pretty hard to build python reproducably. 3) You could try to write bindings for python-build-standalone, again this also forces your end user to have gcc installed, although you can probably just make a script to download the python release from the repo. 4) You could try to use something like RustPython to embed Python and run the python scripts which boot tauri. This makes it so you don't have to install anything other than Rust. But RustPython is slower.

You need to have a main.rs function to be built into a packaged dependency, and that seems to be what you might be missing. You need to add the embedded interpreter into that.

I've created an WIP example pull request for you to view that shows what I'm talking about with RustPython.