google-api-python-client: Breaking change: 1.8.1 breaks PyInstaller apps and any scenario where library is not installed with pip

Hey guys, I had the same issue with pyinstaller what did the trick for me was to roll back from google-api-python-client from version 1.8.2 to 1.8.0. I hope this issue gets fixed soon. It wasn’t fixed in 1.8.2 as commented due to the fact I was facing the same issue on 1.8.2

python -m pip install google-api-python-client==1.8.0

Thanks

Roll back to google-api-python-client 1.8.0 worked for me. Thanks BoxingStudioGames. Wasted a good 3 hours fixing this issue this morning… with the latest version google-api-python-client.

I had this issue with python 3.7 and google-api-python-client 1.12.8. To solve it I added google-api-python-client as data at the initial pyinstaller line. --add-data has two parameters, SRC;DEST (for Windows), but SRC path searches from the main python scripts folder. So I just got back from my initial directory, then wrote the right path. So it looked like this:

--add-data ../../../../anaconda3/envs/[ENVIRONMENT_NAME]/lib/site-packages/google_api_python_client-1.12.8.dist-info;google_api_python_client-1.12.8.dist-info

Writing the whole path for SRC like “C://…/././” didn’t work.

As DEST path, I tried to write a dot, but it didn’t work.

One last issue I had before solving was quotes. In the Adding Data Files explanation of PyInstaller, it shows that you need to add quotes. It turns out that when looking for that path, PyInstaller actually shows these quotes as the part of path, so it can’t find them (at least it was showing it that way in the spec file). So no need to write the quotes.

2021 August Edit: I think now the part about quotes has been changed. Now you need to add them.

@DrMantisTobbogan yes, it still works for me with latest versions.

Sean, I was able to get things working with the latest library by modifying my PyInstaller spec file to include the package metadata, see:

https://github.com/jay0lee/GAM/blob/master/src/gam.spec#L16

I was able to work around this with following changes to my PyInstaller .spec file:

extra_files = [copy_metadata('google-api-python-client')]

a = Analysis(['gyb.py'],
             excludes=['FixTk', 'tcl', 'tk', '_tkinter', 'tkinter', 'Tkinter'],
             datas=extra_files,
             hiddenimports=[],
             hookspath=None,
             runtime_hooks=None)

the important steps being setting extra_files and then specifying it as the datas parameter to Analysis()

I still wanted to call out that this seems to have broken a number of projects.

I get this error also when installing in pip3 module 'googleapiclient' has no attribute '__version__'

@LMaiorano that’s actually a different issue. Since version 2.0.0 this library has included static documents for all Google Discovery APIs. To use them, you’d need to tell PyInstaller to include those static .json files in your build.

https://github.com/googleapis/google-api-python-client/pull/1109

https://pyinstaller.org/en/stable/spec-files.html#adding-files-to-the-bundle

or, as you found you can just set static_discovery=False which causes the library to dynamically download the API’s discovery file from Google on build().

1.8.2 is now released.