pyqtdeploy - A Tool for Deploying PyQt5 Applications
====================================================

What is pyqtdeploy?
-------------------

pyqtdeploy is a tool that, in conjunction with other tools provided with Qt,
enables the deployment of PyQt5 applications.  It supports deployment to
desktop platforms (Linux, Windows and OS/X) and to mobile platforms (iOS,
Android and Windows RT).

pyqtdeploy works by taking the individual modules of a PyQt5 application,
freezing them, and then placing them in a Qt resource file that is converted to
C++ code by Qt's ``rcc`` tool.  Python's standard library is handled in the
same way.

pyqtdeploy generates a simple C++ wrapper around the Python interpreter library
that uses the Python import mechanism to enable access to the embedded frozen
modules in a similar way that Python supports the packaging of modules in zip
files.

Finally pyqtdeploy generates a Qt ``.pro`` file that describes all the
generated C++ code.  From this Qt's ``qmake`` tool is used to generate a
platform-specific ``Makefile`` which will then generate a single executable.
Further Qt and/or platform specific tools can then be used to convert the
executable to a platform specific deployable package.

When run pyqtdeploy presents a GUI that allows the modules that make up the
application to be specified, along with the PyQt5 components that the
application requires and the parts of the Python standard library that should
also be included.  This information is stored in a pyqtdeploy project file.
pyqtdeploy can also be run as a command line tool to generate the C++ code from
a project file.


Author
------

pyqtdeploy is copyright (c) Riverbank Computing Limited.  Its homepage is
http://www.riverbankcomputing.com/software/pyqtdeploy/.

Support may be obtained from the PyQt mailing list at
http://www.riverbankcomputing.com/mailman/listinfo/pyqt


License
-------

pyqtdeploy is released under the BSD license.


Installation
------------

pyqtdeploy can be dowloaded an installed from PyPI::

    pip3 install pyqtdeploy

pyqtdeploy requires PyQt5 to be installed.  This is not installed
automatically.


Documentation
-------------

The documentation for the latest release can be found
`here <http://pyqt.sourceforge.net/Docs/pyqtdeploy/>`__.
