pex

See also https://github.com/pantsbuild/pex I've had great success using pex to bundle up tools that use a few dependencies. It's a lot simpler than tools that try to bundle a full python distribution.

I've been really happy using Pex[1] for releases, but it's not 100% perfect. It definitely feels less painful than other ways of doing things. At one point I used bdist_rpm for all of my projects, and then made sure I had all the dependencies installed (also through RPM, using FPM to create an RPM if it didn't exist). It was a nightmare. 1: https://github.com/pantsbuild/pex

So...like pex but worse? https://github.com/pantsbuild/pex

They actually don't completely statically link everything - there is a small set of base libraries (glibc and I forget what else), and generally all compiled dependencies other than those from the base runtime are linked into a binary. Google released a bunch of their main build system recently, so you can see various hints about their internal practices there, starting with the documentation: http://bazel.io/docs/be/c-cpp.html#cc_binary.linkstatic The OSS bazel defaults to linkstatic=0, but I think internally they use linkstatic=1 there. "mostly static" mode. That's just C/C++ of course, but a similar approach applies to Python, where there are zipped single-file executables that contain all of a python app's dependencies except for python itself and things like libc6. There's a primitive form of that in bazel at https://github.com/baz