PyInstaller not supported

[Anisse Ezzebdi (AnisseEzzebdi)]

Hello community, I developped a Desktop GUI application (with tkinter) that connects to a SQL Server database through ODBC Driver 18. I use pyodbc for that matter, and PyInstaller to create the executable from the Python script file, and it always works.
But when I wanted to switch to mssql-python, the EXE created could not even open, and the unhandled exception [WinError 3] error message states that the system cannot find the path specified of mssql_python, so I switched back to pyodbc.

My OS: Windows 11
My Python version: 3.14.8 (soon 3.15.0)
My command: pyinstaller --onefile --windowed --clean --noupx Desktop_GUI_app.py

Any ideas?

[Animesh Kumar (CaptainAni187)]

PyInstaller usually doesn't pick up everything mssql-python needs on its own. The package ships native parts (mssql_python/ddbc_bindings*.pyd, a bundled msvcp140.dll, plus the separate mssql_py_core package), and there's no PyInstaller hook for it, so the exe ends up missing files and fails with that "path not found" error.

Try telling PyInstaller to grab both packages completely:

pyinstaller --collect-all mssql_python --collect-all mssql_py_core app.py

(or the same thing as collect_all(...) in your .spec file). That pulls in the binaries and data files along with the Python code. If it still fails, building with --onedir first and checking whether an mssql_python folder ends up inside _internal makes it easy to see what's still missing.