It’s super nice to be able to just share a URL, but if I want to bundle up an app into a file I can distribute to Windows, Mac, or Linux users, is that possible?
The short answer is no, Anvil is for building web apps, so those apps are hosted online and accessed through a URL. You could distribute a shortcut file that linked to the web app, but ultimately they’re still going online to use it.
The longer answer is maybe…the link Tony shared is for the open source Anvil server. That’s intended to be run in your own web server that you setup and maintain. I’ve seen applications that you download bundled with their own web servers, so I suppose it’d be possible to do the same with a web server and Anvil’s open source server. I can’t recall anyone ever posting about trying it before, though, so you’d be breaking new ground.
Also possibly of interest is that you can write an Anvil app to function offline, running from the client-side cache: Anvil Docs | Offline Apps That’s not technically the same as what you asked, but somewhat related.
There are also Web Bundles which supposedly allow you to package a web app up for distribution offline (e.g. via a file). I have zero experience with either those or their compatibility with an Anvil app.
There might be other approaches, hopefully if someone has gone down this route they’ll chime in with ideas.
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Nice, thanks – is there any tool for desktop python that supports the sort of drag-and-drop GUI builder/code editor that Anvil supports? For reference, I’m coming from LiveCode, where you download a single-file executable, open it, drag-and-drop your UI, write the code in a live environment (hence the name), tell it what platforms you want, hit deploy, and get single-file executables for each platform.
To be clear, Anvil is great, and I can see using it in many circumstances, but I still long for the ability to send people a single file and say, “here, double-click this”.
I come from VB6 and I have looked for VP (the equivalent in Python) for years, and I never found anything that made me happy.
When I found Anvil I realized that the world has changed, every computer is connected, and it’s easier to give a link that works on every device as long as it’s connected rather than a file that only works on a specific environment.
So I am fully converted now. I am migrating my old VB6 tools to Anvil and it turned out to be easier both for me and for the users.
I have a few CNC machines with embedded Windows that can’t load Anvil apps because they have a limited version of IE, but can use the good old VB6 tools. Even if I could run the Anvil server in those machines, I would still not be able to open the app.
So I gave a tablet to the operators and they use the Anvil apps from the tablet next to the machine.
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