cx_Freeze - Preventing including unneeded packages

The reason for the not working "excludes" command was that I forgot to include the build options into the setup. After adding the respective line into the code excluding works:

from cx_Freeze import setup, Executable
import sys

# exclude unneeded packages. More could be added. Has to be changed for
# other programs.
build_exe_options = {"excludes": ["tkinter", "PyQt4.QtSql", "sqlite3", 
                                  "scipy.lib.lapack.flapack",
                                  "PyQt4.QtNetwork",
                                  "PyQt4.QtScript",
                                  "numpy.core._dotblas", 
                                  "PyQt5"],
                     "optimize": 2}

# Information about the program and build command. Has to be adjusted for
# other programs
setup(
    name="MyProgram",                           # Name of the program
    version="0.1",                              # Version number
    description="MyDescription",                # Description
    options = {"build_exe": build_exe_options}, # <-- the missing line
    executables=[Executable("MyProgram.py",     # Executable python file
                            base = ("Win32GUI" if sys.platform == "win32" 
                            else None))],
)

This decreased the program size from 230MB to 120MB. Nevertheless, I did not find a nice way of excluding all unneeded packages. By trial and error (deleting the biggest files in the build folder test-wise) I figured out which classes I can exclude.

I tried whether the matplotlib backends cause the problem and finally figured out that this is not the case. Nontheless, if anybody needs code to exclude all modules of a certain name scheme in a particular folder except some special ones, he may adjust the following to his needs:

mplBackendsPath = os.path.join(os.path.split(sys.executable)[0],
                        "Lib/site-packages/matplotlib/backends/backend_*")

fileList = glob.glob(mplBackendsPath)

moduleList = []

for mod in fileList:
    modules = os.path.splitext(os.path.basename(mod))[0]
    if not module == "backend_qt4agg":
        moduleList.append("matplotlib.backends." + modules)

build_exe_options = {"excludes": ["tkinter"] + moduleList, "optimize": 2}

I would be happy about more elegant solutions. Further ideas are still welcome. Nevertheless, I regard the problem as solved for me.

I was having a similar problem on a very simple PyQt4 Gui for a small database where the program was 58Mb for a small amount of code, the problem being that the entire PyQt4 folder was being included in the program.

The article here refers to using zip_include_packages in your options to exclude files or to compress them to reduce the file size.

I excluded the entire PyQt4 folder and then included the bits I needed as shown below and it reduced the whole package to 16Mb automatically

options = {
'build_exe': {
    'packages':packages,
    'zip_include_packages':'PyQt4',
    'includes':['PyQt4.QtCore','PyQt4.QtGui','sqlite3','sys','os'],
},

Not sure it is the right way to do it but seems to have no negative impact on my program as of yet