hatch-build-isolated-binary

hatch isn't currently able to create a distributable binary that can bootstrap itself on first run without having a network connection, so I wrote this script to automate building that sort of binary.

Requirements

• hatch is being used for the project

• the script depends on the python version being set in pyproject.toml (from hatch docs), e.g.:

  [tool.hatch.build.targets.binary]
  python-version = "3.13"

• a network connection is required during the build process

Instructions

Put the build_binary.py script somewhere and run it like:

hatch run python <path-to>/build_binary.py

Or the package can be installed and then run via the build-binary command.

Here's a breakdown of what the script will do:

• use hatch to download a Python distribution into a directory named <project-name>-<project-version> within the directory returned by tempfile.gettempdir()
• build a wheel of the project
• install the project wheel into the Python dist
• make a bzip archive of the dist named python.bz2 in the aforementioned temp dir
• use hatch to build a binary with the archived dist embedded in it

Caveats

I did try to make it platform-agnostic, and it works for me on Windows, but I haven't needed it on Linux or Mac, so I haven't tried them yet.

TODO

• It can be helpful to keep the temp files (the Python distribution) around for faster rebuilds, but maybe add an easy way to remove them.