Setting up a development environment for development and packaging of Linux desktop applications using Kivy is not straightforward.

This example demonstrates creating a debian package of a kivy application on Ubuntu 12.04. The Vagrantfile provisions an Ubuntu instance using the included bookstrap.sh.

bootstrap.sh does the following:

• Sets up the Ubuntu Desktop
• Installs python, kivy, and pyinstaller
• Packages a kivy demo application as a single-file binary
• Creates a .deb contains the kivy app and an Unity Launcher (.desktop file)
• Installs the .deb package using dpkg
• Creates a shortcut on the Desktop that the user can double-click to launch the app

Instructions:

• Install VirtualBox and Vagrant
• git clone https://github.com/rajbot/kivy_pyinstaller_linux_example.git
• cd kivy_pyinstaller_linux_example
• vagrant up (this will take a while)
• After the provisioning script is finished, type vagrant reload to boot into the desktop environment you just installed
• In the VirtualBox GUI window, log in as user "vagrant", pw "vagrant"
• Double-click on the Kivy Pong icon on the Desktop to launch the app

The setup script will install Kivy and PyInstaller in a virtualenv. We need to install Kivy in a virtualenv instead of using the PPA because we need the kivy.tools package in order to use the PyInstaller helper functions supplied by Kivy. The PPA does not install the kivy.tools package.

In our PyInstaller .spec file, we install hooks using this code:

from kivy.tools.packaging.pyinstaller_hooks import install_hooks
install_hooks(globals())