Troubleshooting

If you are encountering issues with build_apps, please first make sure you are using the latest release of Panda3D. A large number of improvements and bug fixes have been made to this system since it was first released.

This page lists a number of common issues encountered when packaging using build_apps.

Executable closes right away when run

Was it built via gui_apps? In this case, you need to make sure to specify a log file via log_filename, and then find and open the written log file to read out the error messages. Usually, it is something simple like a missing file, but you need to be able to see the error message to find out. Alternatively, you can build it with console_apps without specifying a log file, and read the error from the console.

Exception: No graphics pipe is available!

Have you included a render plug-in, such as pandagl, in your setup.py file?

No audio in compiled application

Have you included an audio plug-in, such as p3openal_audio, in your setup.py file?

Application crashes without a helpful error message

By default, build_apps will use a version of Panda3D that is built with optimizations enabled. This also means that many checks and error messages are disabled. It may help when debugging an application that only crashes in its compiled form to use a non-optimized build of Panda3D. This can be done by adding 'use_optimized_wheels': False to setup.py.

No wheels available for dependency package

The standard way to distribute Python packages is via .whl files uploaded to PyPI. Nevertheless, it is possible that a .whl file for a package cannot be found. Check the list of downloads on PyPI for a package to see what the problem might be, which is usually one of the following:

The package does not publish wheel files for your version of Python.

Some packages are compiled for a specific version of Python. If no wheel is published for the version of Python you are using, you may need to switch to using a different version, or choose an alternative package.

The package has wheel files for a newer version of the platform.

For example, the latest version of numpy provides wheels for manylinux2010_x86_64, but not for manylinux1_x86_64. You may need to adjust the platforms list in your setup.py to bump the minimum version of the given platform.

The package does not publish wheel files for one of the target platforms.

Some packages provide wheels for some platforms, but not all. If you do not care about the platform, you can simply drop it from the platforms list in setup.py, otherwise you will have to look for an alternative package or build the wheel yourself for the given platform.

The package does not publish wheel files at all.

If it is a pure-Python package without platform-specific C extensions, it is easy to build a .whl yourself by downloading the package, running python setup.py bdist_wheel, and then adding -f path/to/directory/ on a blank line to your requirements.txt pointing pip to the directory containing the .whl file. If it is a package with compiled C extensions, then this becomes more difficult. The easiest option at this point is to choose a different package that does publish wheel files, but otherwise, you must build the package manually for each individual platform.