I'm making my own chess GUI and am using python chess and stockfish for it. After freezing it into an executable, every time I call chess.engine.SimpleEngine.popen_uci('location\\of\\stockfish'), it opens the shell for stockfish and if I close the shell, stockfish stops working. What do I do so that the shell is only running in the background and is not visible to the user?
This is a platform-specific question and I am guessing from 'location\\of\\stockfish' that Windows is the platform you are interested in.
popen_uci accepts a ** (extra keywords) parameter and you can use that to pass parameters through to subprocess.Popen(). Use the passthrough parameter startupinfo to provide an instance of subprocess.STARTUPINFO. That in turn can set the win32 flag wShowWindow to do what you want.