Posted by José Lopes

When you run py2exe for a small Python program you may notice that the file library.zip it's too big.
This may cause some problems if you're planning to make a distribution.
This post explains why and how to minimize this file size.

This problem is often a consequence of the compatibility problem between projects, already described on this post.

For all your projects py2exe keeps all the necessary data on the directory build, including the compiled python modules (files with the extension .pyc or .pyo).
If no reset is done to this directory between projects (deleting all its content), py2exe will accumulate data.
Even when you don't get a compatibility problem when running the programs between projects, the fact is that a lot of files will pile up on the build directory and naturally increasing the library.zip file that may get to a several MBytes size.

The methods you have to avoid this are:

• Edit the zip file and delete the files you don't need (not very nice!)
• Reset the build directory in order that only the project modules will be included.
  You can do this anytime, just delete this directory content and run again py2exe.