Pyinstaller in virtual environment still yields very large EXE file

I have a Python code of 78 lines using the following packages:

import pandas as pd
import base64
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
import os
import win32com.client as win32
import pathlib

I ran the following commands:

venv\Scripts\activate
python -m pip install pandas
python -m pip install pybase64
python -m pip install bs4
python -m pip install pywin32
python -m pip install pyinstaller
pyinstaller --onefile to_HTML.py

I have created a virtual environment in which I installed only the above packages.

Yet the EXE file created is 740Mb!!

What am I doing wrong? How can I reduce it?

Answer

It doesn't look like you've installed pyinstaller within your virtual environment. I suspect it's attempting to use your global pyinstaller, which may be attempting to wrap any other packages you've installed globally.

Try this:

venv\Scripts\activate
python -m pip install pyinstaller
# install other dependencies as needed
venv\Scripts\pyinstaller.exe --onefile to_HTML.py

Based on my quick test case, I get a very different file size when running with the virtual environment pyinstaller vs. the global one.