Recently, my colleague Julia and I made a Python script to support outreach to faculty. You can read about our attempts to document the project here.

Because deploying a script like this can be difficult for librarians who are sometimes unfamiliar with Python, we thought it might be useful to sidestep some of the complexity by creating a desktop app that would obviate the need for working directly with the command line.

There is more than one way to create and package desktop applications in Python. We used Gooey and Pyinstaller. Gooey is useful for turning a program built on Python’s argparse into a GUI application. Since we already had a working command line application made with argparse, this was a good fit for us.

We also needed to create an executable. The Gooey documentation provides steps for doing this using Pyinstaller. We basically followed these instructions, and they worked as advertised. We ended up with an .exe file that we could put on our desktops to run the application. While the .exe file won’t work across platforms (Pyinstaller is not a cross-compiler), it does work for our librarians. So now there’s no need for librarians to wrangle with the command line; the desktop app takes care of that.

If you’re interested, we branched the GitHub repo for this project, so there is a separate branch for the command line application and the GUI application. Let us know if you find this useful!

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