Deploying on Windows servers : advice sought a module

[Rory Campbell-Lange]

We have written a cross-platform monitoring system that we have deployed
on our Linux servers and wish to put on our Windows servers too.

In the past I've played with py2exe and similar packages. However the
frequent updates to the monitoring suite mean that reinstalling an exe
for each update would quickly become onerous.

As we are used to the excellent versioning and updates provided by
Debian I'm wary of installing different packages around the internet
onto each Windows server. Is there a good way of combining packages and
dependencies into an easily-deployable, and easily-updateable unit?
Advice gratefully received.

Notes about our setup:

The Linux servers all have local installs of mercurial, python-yaml and
Python 2.6. The advantage of having mercurial locally installed on each
server is that we are making fairly frequent updates to the system and
we can easily automate the hg pull/update process.

Windows servers use Tim Golden's WMI modules and the pywin32 extensions.

 

[Rory Campbell-Lange]

At my work place I still use py2exe but I do not rely on its automatic
discovery and packaging.

The setup.py lists all the dependencies explicitly in "packages" and
"includes" parameters. These end up in library.zip.

Then the source file paths with the actual business logic are gathered
with os.walk and passed in as data_files parameter.

Finally the actual service executable is generated from the very
minimal script. This executable is registered only once and as long as
you do not move it to a different directory Windows will find it and
start it up for you.

The service script that gets used by py2exe is truly minimal. It just
changes working directory to where the executable sits, adds current
directory to the sys.path and loads the main script.

....

Hi Waldemar. Thanks for your advice. I'll have another play with py2exe.

Many thanks
Rory