# Rethinking Standalone installation

**URL:** <https://discourse.psychopy.org/t/rethinking-standalone-installation/4105>\
**Category:** Development\
**Tags:** standalone, installer\
**Created:** [March 12, 2018, 4:23pm UTC](https://discourse.psychopy.org/t/rethinking-standalone-installation/4105 "2018-03-12T16:23:57Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![jon](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/flex002/user_avatar/discourse.psychopy.org/jon/32/22_2.png) [@jon](https://discourse.psychopy.org/u/jon)\
**Post date:** [March 12, 2018, 4:23pm UTC](https://discourse.psychopy.org/t/rethinking-standalone-installation/4105/1 "2018-03-12T16:23:57Z")

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Now that pip installs _nearly_ all the dependencies so easily (not pyo sound, and wx/qt depends on Python version) I feel like we could change the standalone installer to be more of a “network installer” resulting in a more “standard” python installation (maybe a separate installation location, like Applications/PsychoPy/ but otherwise a standard python install.

I created an issue on github - let’s discuss the guts there rather than here - but feel free to add minor comments here too.

> <https://github.com/psychopy/psychopy/issues/1768>
>
> \## Origin
> 
> The Standalone PsychoPy distribution was designed to get people up …and running easily when they didn't know much about Python and the (many) dependencies that PsychoPy has. It provides a set of working libs and meant we knew the user had all packages installed.
> 
> It was designed at a time when many libs couldn't be installed using pip (e.g. needing a double-click download. That is less true these days: almost everything can be installed with \`pip\` (pyo can't, and wxPython and PyQt can't on Py2.7 but they can on Py3.x)
> 
> \## Problem
> 
> The standalone packages is that the don't provide a "standard" install which makes it harder to interface with additional tools:
> 
> \- On windows they don't touch the registry so further package installs don't "see" the psychopy python. 
> \- On Mac the Python interpreter doesn't run (due to being frozen with py2app) and that means we can't run from terminal or PyCharm
> 
> \## Proposed solution
> 
> Instead of packaging it ourselves, let's have a network installer package:
> 
> 1. we want a wizard that takes input from the user:
> - where should we install?
> - which dependencies do you want (required, hardware, analysis tools etc)?
> - do you want shortcuts so that it still looks like a standard app to newbies (windows start menu, mac app bundle)? These need creating at the end as part of script.
> - provide USB install scripts similar to psychtoolbox (e.g. see #1698 )
> 
> 2. The install options could either use an existing Python installation or create a new one (download stock python, silent install it and then use pip from there). Maybe even a virtual env (but then need to be able to switch to it from windows shortcut?)
> 3. The installer package itself would be a minimal Python could be written and packaged once, but could then install any version (use pip install flags to specify version) 
> 4. For sys admin types this could allow overriding default prefs with 'site' defaults as well?
> 5. Potentially, If we created the installer wizard using wx, it could be packaged as a mini app, but it could also double-up as a visual pip package-manager within PsychoPy?
> 
> This is going to be quite a bit of work. It means creating a wx wizard (or similar cross-platform tool?) and working out the various scripting issues (detecting permissions etc) but the gains would be big