Building Cross Platform

PyInstaller is not a cross compiler. Due to Python’s dynamic nature, PyInstaller needs to run snippets of code from the target Python environment at build time and it can only do that if said environment is runable on (i.e. built for) the current platform. Hence, PyInstaller ever becoming a cross compiler is impossible.

However, building for platforms you don’t own is still possible through use of either virtualisation or Continuous Integration (a.k.a. CI/CD). These are in fact much better than cross compiling since you can also use them to verify your application rather than relying on your users to tell you that your application’s defunct.

Virtualisation

Building for Linux

docker run -it -v "$PWD:/io" ubuntu:20.04
cd /io
export LANG=C.UTF-8 LC_ALL=C LANGUAGE=C DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive
apt-get update
apt-get install --no-install-recommends -y software-properties-common curl binutils
add-apt-repository -y ppa:deadsnakes/ppa
apt-get update
apt-get install --no-install-recommends -y libpython3.11 python3.11
pip install pyinstaller -r requirements.txt
python3.11 your-code.py
pyinstaller application.py
./dist/application/application

Building for Linux cross architecture

Building for macOS x86_64

Building for macOS arm64

Building for Windows AMD64 (a.k.a. 64 bit)

Building for Windows x86 (a.k.a. 32 bit)

To build for 32 bit, simply use a 32 bit Python installer from python.org/downloads on any (virtualised) Windows platform. Pip will automatically ensure that you get 32 bit variants of PyInstaller and all of your dependencies.

Building for Windows ARM64

All Windows ARM64 devices can use emulation to run x86 binaries and almost all can run AMD64 binaries so if performance isn’t critical, building either of those is acceptable. Note that not many packages support Windows ARM64 which may force you to take the emulation route even if you can access ARM64 hardware.

Supporting older platforms

Windows

To support Windows 7, 8.0 or server <= 2012, you must use Python 3.8 or older since Python itself dropped support for these platforms.

macOS

On macOS, the macOS deployment target of all your binaries must be <= the oldest version of macOS you intend to support. This means:

You can’t use anything from Homebrew (Python itself, Python packages, command line tools, Dylibs).
When compiling anything from source, clang must be given the -mmacosx-version-min=10.14 flag. If the version of macOS you’re targeting is less than 10.12 then clang also needs the -Wunguarded-availability and -Werror=unguarded-availability flags. Depending on the build system, this is usually controlled by setting the MACOSX_DEPLOYMENT_TARGET=10.14 environment variable.