Packaging Streamlit web app into an Electron desktop app: non-pure Python packages

[lechtec]

I'm a big fan of the idea of an automated service to bundle up a Streamlit app developed in Python in an Electron desktop app. This provides a great way for data scientists and developers to easily share their dashboards to non-technical crowds, without the need of having to figure out hosting for the dashboard on a web server.

My question

My question relates to stlite-cli. In general, is there any way to export non-pure Python packages into an Electron desktop app? If so, what does this process require? If this method already exists, does anyone know of implementations that have achieved this before? I am a novice in Electron, and I haven't found any straightforward resources for doing that.

Thank you!

[whitphx]

Thank you, I totally agree on the possibility of such an automated bundling service! That's on the roadmap, but takes time too. So please be patient until it :)

For your question,
do you mean that you want to use non-pure Python packages such as NumPy within the stlite Electron app?
If so, you can simply use the -r option of the dump command that you can find in the document by grepping -r, for example, npm run dump streamlit_app -- -r numpy
This sample project uses this method to install matplotlib (See https://github.com/whitphx/stlite-desktop-example/blob/b7c531c46aab9e612039cc15dfcac83f33629c33/.github/workflows/build.yml#L30)

[Update on 0.16.0]
The command signature has been changed so that the -r option is now for specifying the requirements file like pip. For the details, see the README.

However, only the C packages compiled for the Pyodide (Wasm) runtime are installable like NumPy, and there are some unavailable C extensions on stlite such as TensorFlow. (https://github.com/whitphx/stlite#limitations)

I am a novice in Electron,

FYI, TBH, I'm too.
In the stlite desktop app projects, electron-builder is directly used (see the dist and pack commands in the package.json of the project template https://github.com/whitphx/stlite/tree/main/packages/desktop-cli#readme) and I actually don't care what happens behind 😅