You are not alone. __main__.py in a zip has been supported litterally since Python 2.6 but very few people knew about it. Eventually in 3.5, the zipapp module h

You are not alone. __main__.py in a zip has been supported litterally since Python 2.6 but very few people knew about it. Eventually in 3.5, the zipapp module has been released to make the feature more discoverable, but again it has been mostly ignored. I think the reason is that something like shiv was missing: it streamlines the process, shows a finish product instead of just telling people "all the thing they can do", and the automatic unzipping solved plenty of problems that you had with alternative like Pex, espacially on windows or with static resources. So now you have it. Spread the word.