Decompiling py2exe Executables

We had to decompile an executable (.exe) generated with py2exe for Python 3.

py2exe takes a Python program and generates a Windows executable. This .exe file contains the Python bytecode of the program, a Python interpreter and all the necessary modules. The bytecode is stored as a resource inside the .exe file.

unpy2exe will extract the Python bytecode as a pyc file from the .exe file, which can then be decompiled with uncompyle6. Unfortunately, unpy2exe does not support files generated with py2exe for Python 3.

We release our program decompile-py2exe to handle py2exe Python 3 executables. It is simple to use:

decompile-py2exe takes an executable as argument, extracts the Python bytecode and decompiles it with uncompyle6, all in one step. The executable can also be passed via stdin or inside a (password protected) ZIP file. Be sure to use Python 3 to run decompile-py2exe.