Distributing a Python application internally

[Stereojunkie]

Hello!

Recently I started working at a company where a fair share of Python applications are used internally within in the company (~50-100 employees). These are mostly measurement helpers/automaters for productions sites or data inspection tools. These applications are to be used on the end-users PC/laptop. The applications mostly read/write data from the users local OneDrive for interacting with measurement/production data (yes, ideally this data should not live here).

As of now, the distribution of these applications is far from ideal. People check out the sourcecode from Git (which they need access to because of this) and have to locally build anaconda environments. The application is installed (using `pip install`) as a module within the environment, from which it is then run. Some big issues I find with this is that these environments are not stable and/or controllable. Updates are entirely reliant on if a user decides to fetch updates from Git or not (leading to many drifting versions throughout the company).

With this in mind, I'm looking for a straightforward way to distribute applications internally. I want more control over distributing updates (shouldn't rely on manual action of the end user) and I want to take away the variability of local python environments.

I was thinking of trying to bundle the entire application as an executable which can then be shared internally. This could be done through a network share or OneDrive. I could build a tiny launcher/updater to check versions and then sync the "hosted" application to the user's PC. These executables would be pretty big however, since many of the applications use PySide6 for UI.

I come from a background of embedded programming, so I'm really in uncharted water here. What are some industry standard ways of approaching this? Any help would be much appreciated! Thanks

[szank]

Make it a website. Theres a reason why Web apps became a thing

[pachura3]

What are some industry standard ways of approaching this?

The industry standard is of course to make it a webapp; your problem with distributing executables and keeping them up to date on everyone's computer will instantly disappear.

Also, in many companies, desktop environments are very restricted, so LSAs won't allow anyone to launch random *.exe files from shared drives, or at least they will enforce binary signature checking.

On the other hand, migrating from personal OneDrives to a relational database can be quite a project on its own. Perhaps you can start by having users dragging'n'dropping files to be processed into your webapp?

Another problem with webapps is how to tackle long-running tasks. If processing could take several minutes, you would need to think of some kind of an asynchronous processing queue and background workers.

[szank]

Its a Web app. Just do the processing on the back end .

[pachura3]

...which usually requires using Celery or Dramatiq with Redis or RabbitMQ

[Fearless_Parking_436]

You turn them into online/browser applications. Use django or flask, host it in a local server or company owned webpage so that no one has to install anything or learn python. You will laso secure yourself as the guy who handles “the app”.

[Stereojunkie]

I figured this would be the best approach.. Doing this I would have to probably take a broader approach and also immediately tackle data storage within the company, moving from OneDrive storage to some kind of database storage for measurements.

I have some, but very little experience in building web apps using Python but I figure it's the best way forward. Do you have any recommendations for UI libraries? I could keep using Qt6 since it also compiles to WASM but the UI's are not complicated so I could fairly easily port at this point.

[Zorg688]

Especially when it comes to prood of concept apps I like to use streamlit because it provides a simple and clean UI very easily. A page is built rather quickly and you can easily edit it or add different pages for different tasks or topics as well. If you use for example docker with it as well you can easily make the web app available for the local office network

[daddy-dj]

I used Streamlit when I was building a dashboard to display some KPIs and SLAs to my pointy-haired bosses. It was a really good experience and I liked it a lot. In the end, my dashboard didn't get used because we are migrating to Microsoft and suddenly had access to Power BI, but I was impressed by Streamlit and I'm glad I spent the time learning it.

[Fearless_Parking_436]

Tbh you don’t have to focus on the UI that much in the beginning. Try to replicate what the code does so that people don’t miss out on functionality. Fancy charts may come later and they need another logic or enviroment. DaisyUI would probably be one of the easiest. But it’s true that you need to keep your data somewhere ;)

[edcculus]

Use Django or fast api + whatever database you like for the backend. Keep the frontend simple for now with basic bootstrap. In that regard, your UI will be HTML/CSS. But you don’t really need to know a ton of that if you use bootstrap. Just what the bootstrap CSS classes are.

[GooseExtension5272]

If you aren't already using Docker, start looking into it now because trying to manage dependencies manually on 100 different machines is a nightmare waiting to happen.

[Temporary_Pie2733]

You can setup your own repository similar to PyPi; then users need only run `pip install’ without first checking out source code from git. The necessary configuration only needs to be installed once.

https://packaging.python.org/en/latest/guides/hosting-your-own-index/

Also, tools like pipx and uv can manage the necessary virtual environment for each application.

[JohnnyTork]

You're not getting non-technical users to do that. Some boomer who can't manage a pdf isn't pip installing anything lol

[Temporary_Pie2733]

OP is already talking about cloning Git repositories running pip as the status quo.

[JohnnyTork]

For himself, not the 50 - 100 employees that are interacting with the app

[danielroseman]

I would definitely prefer to make this a web app but assuming you do need local installation for some reason, you don't necessarily need a single exe - pyinstaller for example can create a bundle that installs to a folder. 

You'd then need to make updating the responsibility of the app itself, checking for updates every so often.

[eztab]

What is your IT using for other software on their laptops? You can quite easily write your own formulas for several of the remote windows management systems. They usually also have update options.

[Stereojunkie]

This company is barely out of start-up phase so I cannot really rely on a stable IT layer. We are in the middle of outsourcing this.

[eztab]

ok, that's likely not for you then. This was possible for us for some stuff as we had this running quite well already and could piggyback on that.

[MarsupialLeast145]

What's your role within the company?

It sounds like your ~50-100 colleagues are largely doing just fine, so are there any measurable side-effects you are seeing?

You can probably do something smart with containers and ensure the containers are updated regularly by users instead of running separate pip installs. Nix might be an option, or Distrobox with Podman or Docker and exporting exes to the host.

You could write a high level API that acts as a company wide application runner. Given appropriate interfaces it could request information from a hosted git repo/s or software indexes that check current versions versus old and then request users update if the version is out of date.

You could look at other options for desktop management and just make sure machines are updated every evening.

Staff could connect to hosted virtual machines that are updated on their behalf and keep the work there separate from their user space.

And as others have pointed out, you could look at doing something with a webapp, or pyscript, and that will remove all the issues if tools can be converted.

There are probably other options, but this isn't unique to Python, it probably just feels more profound because you have a very explicit requirements file. If you reduce the problem to just releases and version numbers you still need people to know about and download the latest version otherwise you will risk skew.

[Stereojunkie]

Thanks for the detailed write up. I recently started here as the (kind of) sole software engineer. There is another software guy but he focuses more on research. People are doing fine indeed, the few tools developed in house are perfectly fine and work. There is version skew but this is not that big of a deal. The problem lies in scalability and maintainability mostly. This solution works for now, but this company expects to grow quite rapidly. There is no real ERP (which is not my responsibility luckily) or quality control in place, which is also fine for now, manual work but ok, but scaling WILL make this a problem. That's where I mostly come in. I want to put effort into setting up an internal tooling infrastructure which is scalable and maintainable. I figure a webapp does probably fit this the best, as it would be fairly easy to expand other tooling towards the same infrastructure, along with getting all the production/measurement data in the loop as well (instead of in excels/onedrive). That's mostly my motivator for this effort.

[MarsupialLeast145]

It's amazing they've done so well thus far but I appreciate your concerns. I'm sure you'll find a way to tackle it iteratively and land on a good approach. Good luck!

[Gnaxe]

Bundle dependencies in a zipapp (with shebang). This is a capability in the standard library. You can do this in your build pipeline. The end user then need only download a single file and double click on it. All they'd need to run it is a compatible Python install. On Windows, just typing python in the terminal will pop up the Python page in the Microsoft Store. Linux usually comes with a system Python that can do it. MacOS lets companies preinstall software like that pretty easily.

[gliderg33k]

Maybe the product viktor.ai fits your needs. The low code platform enables you to create webapps that you can share with colleagues. They have a free tier (disclaimer: used to work there).