Compiled Python

Understandably, you may want to hide certain details for commercial purposes or to simplify maintenace by making user-modifications difficult.

As you may know, the python interpreter compiles .py files into .pyc files. These compiled files work cross-platform, but only with the same major.minor version of python.

How

If you move the compiled .pyc to the same directory as the original .py, python will attempt to load the .pyc file.

XPPython3 supports this as well. This means you can:

1. Create your plugin PI_my_fine_plugin.py in, for example, Resources/plugins/PythonPlugins.

2. Run and test it. Python will automatically create __pycache__/PI_my_fine_plugin.cpython-312.pyc.

3. Rename the compiled file to PI_my_fine_plugin.pyc.

4. Move it from the __pycache__ sub-directory to the original location of your plugin.

5. Delete (or at least, don’t deploy) your PI_my_fine_plugin.py file.

Result

XPPython will notice your PI_my_fine_plugin.pyc file on startup in the standard PythonPlugins directory, and will use it to enable your plugin. You can have some or all of your python files compiled, but they will need to be located in the same place where your non-compiled python files would be found:

 --Original files--                 --Compiled files--
└─── PythonPlugins/                └─── PythonPlugins/
     ├─── PI_my_fine_plugin.py          ├─── PI_my_fine_plugin.pyc
     └─── my_fine_plugin/               └─── my_fine_plugin/
          ├─── module.py                     ├─── module.pyc
          ├─── utils.py                      ├─── utils.pyc
          ├─── image.png                     ├─── image.png
          └─── doc/                          └─── doc/

This is easy and works cross-platform. Your code isn’t secure, but it’s in a form which most users would find difficult to modify.

Note this will fail if/when XPPython3 changes it’s underlying version of python (currently 3.12). There are no plans to do this for the lifetime of X-Plane 12. I anticipate that with the next major version of X-Plane (v.13?) XPPython3 will upgrade it’s version of python.

Manual Compilation

You can manually compile your files, placing the resulting *.pyc files in the proper directories using:

$ cd plugins/PythonPlugins
$ python3.12 -m compileall PI_my_fine_plugin.py my_fine_plugin -b -o 2

The -b option causes the compiled files to not be placed in the __pycache__ directory, and the -o 2 option causes all comments to be stripped from the resulting files.

Be sure to compile using Python 3.12, as this will create *.pyc files compatible with XPPython3 for X-Plane 12.