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Packaging apps for distribution

· 3 min read
Feodor Fitsner
Feodor Fitsner
Flet founder and developer

Dear friends! In the final post of this year I would like to thank you all for your contributions to Flet project whether it's spreading a word, submitting pull request, joining Discord discussion or a even sending an annoying bug report!

With your fantastic support we achieved a lot in year 2023:

  • 70+ controls (special thanks to @ndonkoHenri for his tremendous contibution).
  • 7,700 stars on GitHub.
  • 2,150 users with community moderators (thank you guys!) on Discord.
  • Flet integration with Pyodide for pure client-side Python apps - no other frameworks provide a better UI for Pyodide!
  • Flet app in AppStore and Google Play - great way to test on mobile devices and real proof of Flet apps being accepted in stores.
  • ...and finally... drum roll...🥁🥁🥁 flet build command is here! 🎉🎉🎉

🎄 "New Year" 🎄 edition of Flet 0.18.0 has been just released which allows packaging your Flet apps for distribution on all platforms: iOS, Android, Web, macOS, Windows and Linux!

The one command to rule them all!

The full circle is now closed: you can create (flet create), run (flet run) and build (flet build) your Flet apps with Flet CLI.

Flet CLI provides flet build command that allows packaging Flet app into a standalone executable or install package for distribution.

flet build command supersedes both flet pack (packaging into desktop app) and flet publish (packaging into a static website) commands and allows converting your Flet app into Android or iOS bundle, desktop app and a static website.

For building desktop apps flet build does not longer rely on PyInstaller like flet pack does, but uses Flutter SDK to produce a fast, offline, fully customizable (your own icons, about dialog and metadata) executable for Windows, Linux and macOS with Python runtime embedded into executable and running in-process.

Static websites built with flet build, compared to flet publish, have faster load time as all Python dependencies are now packaged into a single archive instead of being pulled in runtime with micropip. flet build web also detects native Python packages built into Pyodide, such as bcrypt, html5lib, numpy and many others, and installs them from Pyodide package registry.

Check Packaging app for distribution guide for complete information about flet build command.

Let us know what you think by joining Flet Discord server or creating a new thread on Flet GitHub discussions.

We wish you Happy New Year! Enjoy your holidays!