A template for building Python apps that will run under iOS.
Install cookiecutter. This is a tool used to bootstrap complex project templates:
$ pip install cookiecutter
Run
cookiecutter
on the Python-iOS template:$ cookiecutter https://github.com/pybee/Python-iOS-template
Download the Python iOS support package, and extract it. This will give you two frameworks.
OpenSSL.framework
Python.framework
Alternatively, you can download the Python-iOS-support project, and build your own versions of these frameworks.
These framework directories should be placed in the same directory as the
app
andapp_packages
directories generated by the cookiecutter project template.
If you've done this correctly, a project called myproject
should have a
directory structure that looks something like:
iOS/ app/ myproject/ __init__.py main.py app_packages/ OpenSSL.framework/ ... Python.framework/ ... myproject/ ... My Project.xcodeproj/ ...
You're now ready to open the XCode project file, build and run your project!
Of course, just running Python code isn't very interesting by itself - you'll be able to output to the console, and see that output in XCode, but if you tap the app icon on your phone, you won't see anything - because there isn't a visible console on an iPhone.
To do something interesting, you'll need to work with the native iOS system libraries to draw widgets and respond to screen taps. The Rubicon Objective C bridging library can be used to enable an easy interface with the iOS system libraries. You could also use the toga library to provides a cross-platform widget toolkit that supports iOS.
Regardless of whether you use Toga, or you write an application natively, the
template project will try to instantiate a UIApplicationMain
instance,
using a class named PythonAppDelegate
as the App delegate. If a class of
that name can't be instantiated, the error raised will be logged, and the
Python interpreter will be shut down.
If you have any external library dependencies (like toga
, or anything other
third-party library), you should install the library code into the
app_packages
directory. This directory is the same as a site_packages
directory on a desktop Python install.
It's also worth noting that the app
and app_packages
code don't need
to contain the actual code. If it's more convenient to keep the code
somewhere else, you can symlink to the actual code inside the app
or
app_packages
directory. At compile time, the symlink will be resolved and
copied to the app bundle, but during development, you can avoid having copies
of code in your source repositories.
One pattern for doing this is to have a top level project directory that contains the source module, and an iOS directory at the same level that links in the project source:
myproject/ iOS/ app/ myproject -> ../../myproject ... myproject/ __init__.py main.py other.py setup.py