Where does pyinstaller place my Python bytecode?

Question

I am using pyinstaller to create an executable for my project,

I am using the following code in a file called my_project.py,

import sys
from PyQt6.QtWidgets import QApplication, QFrame, QVBoxLayout, QPushButton
from PyQt6.QtCore import QEvent, QObject


class ChildWidgetEventFilter(QObject):

    def eventFilter(self, obj: 'QObject', event: 'QEvent') -> bool:
        if event.type() == QEvent.Type.MouseButtonPress:
            print("ChildWidgetEventFilter: eventFilter")
            return False
        return super().eventFilter(obj, event)


class ChildWidget(QPushButton):

    def __init__(self, *args):
        super().__init__(*args)
        """
        We need to set our event filter to a variable or it will be garbage collected when we leave
        scope, i.e. self.installEventFilter(ChildWidgetEventFilter()) will not work.
        """
        self._event_filter = ChildWidgetEventFilter()
        self.installEventFilter(self._event_filter)

    def event(self, event: QEvent) -> bool:
        if event.type() == QEvent.Type.MouseButtonPress:
            print("ChildWidget: event")
            return False
        return super().event(event)

    def mousePressEvent(self, event):
        print("ChildWidget: mousePressEvent")


class ParentWidget(QFrame):

    def mousePressEvent(self, event) -> None:
        print("Inside ParentWidget mousePressEvent")


app = QApplication(sys.argv)
main_window = ParentWidget()

layout = QVBoxLayout()
layout.addWidget(ChildWidget("Click me! I'm the child widget"))

main_window.setLayout(layout)

main_window.show()
sys.exit(app.exec())

The command (pyinstaller my_project.py) runs smoothly and I can run my_project.exe, however, I am trying to understand the structure and cannot seem to find either my original project source code or bytecode version of my project. My understanding is that this is a requirement which the included python3.dll will parse and execute my project.

The output contains,

• PyQt6 Folder and its dependencies
• _bz2.pyd
• _decimal.pyd
• _hashlib.pyd
• _lzma.pyd
• _socket.pyd
• _ssl.pyd
• base_library.zip
• libcrypto-1_1.dll
• libssl-1_1.dll
• my_project.exe
• python3.dll
• python310.dll
• select.pyd
• unicodedata.pyd
• VCRUNTIME140.dll
• VCRUNTIME140_1.dll

My question is, where is my original code (or the bytecode) at for it to execute? Thanks.

Answer 1

PyInstaller embeds compiled Python code (.pyc files) within the executable (my_project.exe), but not the original source (.py). The embedded .pyc files can be extracted from the executable using a tool like PyInstaller Extractor.