When running a cxfreeze binary from a python3.2 project I am getting the following runtime error:

/project/dist/project/distutils/__init__.py:13: UserWarning: The virtualenv distutils package at %s appears to be in the same location as the system distutils?
Traceback (most recent call last):File "/home/chrish/.virtualenvs/project/lib/python3.2/distutils/__init__.py", line 19, in <module>import dist
ImportError: No module named dist

Correspondingly there are several distutils entries in the missing modules section of the cxfreeze output:

? dist imported from distutils
? distutils.ccompiler imported from numpy.distutils.ccompiler
? distutils.cmd imported from setuptools.dist
? distutils.command.build_ext imported from distutils
? distutils.core imported from numpy.distutils.core
...

I've tried forcing distutils to be included as a module, by both importing it in my main python file and by adding it to a cxfreeze setup.py as:

options = {"build_exe": {"packages" : ["distutils"]} },

Neither approach worked. It seems likely that I've somehow broken the virtualenv [as distutils seems fundamental and the warning regarding the location of distutils], repeating with a clean virtualenv replicated the problem.

It may be worth noting that I installed cx-freeze by running $VIRTUAL_ENV/build/cx-freeze/setup.py install as it doesn't install cleanly in pip.

Found another workaround which enables you to still use a virtualenv when freezing.

The workaround is to exclude distutils and add the package from the original interpreter (not from the virtualenv) manually.

# contents of setup.py
from cx_Freeze import setup, Executableimport distutils
import opcode
import os# opcode is not a virtualenv module, so we can use it to find the stdlib; this is the same
# trick used by distutils itself it installs itself into the virtualenv
distutils_path = os.path.join(os.path.dirname(opcode.__file__), 'distutils')
build_exe_options = {'include_files': [(distutils_path, 'distutils')], "excludes": ["distutils"]}setup(name="foo",version="0.1",description="My app",options={"build_exe": build_exe_options},executables=[Executable("foo_main.py", base=None)],
)

Credit to Bruno Oliveira for the answer on github
Full answer in gist: https://gist.github.com/nicoddemus/ca0acd93a20acbc42d1d