Build Pyarmored Wheel¶

Modern Python packages can contain a pyproject.toml file, first introduced in PEP 518 and later expanded in PEP 517, PEP 621 and PEP 660. This file contains build system requirements and information, which are used by pip to build the package.

Since v7.2.0, pyarmor could be as PEP 517 backend to build a pyarmored wheel based on setuptools.build_meta.

Here an example package structure:

mypkg/
    setup.py
    pyproject.toml
    src/
        __init__.py
        ...

The pyproject.toml may like this:

[build-system]
requires = ["setuptools", "wheel"]
build-backend = "setuptools.build_meta"

First make sure backend setuptools.build_meta works by running the following commands to build wheel. If it doesn’t work, please learn the related knowledges and make it works:

cd mypkg/
pip wheel .

Now edit pyproject.toml, change build backend to pyarmor.build_meta:

[build-system]
requires = ["setuptools", "wheel", "pyarmor>=7.2.0"]
build-backend = "pyarmor.build_meta"

Build a pyarmored wheel by same commands:

cd mypkg/
pip wheel .

Or build a pyarmored wheel with Super Mode by passing extra settings to pip --global-option:

cd mypkg/
pip wheel --global-option="--super-mode" .

How does it work¶

The Python scripts obfuscated by pyarmor are same as normal Python scripts with an extra dynamic library or extension. So pyarmor.build_meta just does

Call setuptools.build_meta to build wheel
Unpack wheel
Obfuscate all the .py files in the unpacking path
Append the pyarmor runtime files to wheel file RECORD
Repack the patched wheel

About the details, please refer to function bdist_wheel in the pyarmor/build_meta.py