taurine VS pkg

Although it’s not straightforward how to make it sidecar work with node. I made small starter repo. You can find it here https://github.com/Perfect7M/taurine.

Their team had been using PKG to package Node.js applications into standalone executables, but then they hit a roadblock - PKG has been deprecated. They created a fork of PKG and it became the go-to solution for years, but as they planned to migrate to Node.js v22, they hit another roadblock - PKG hadn't caught up with the latest runtime yet.

https://github.com/vercel/pkg (in public archive since 2024)

To build our project, we'll use the popular PKG package. Let's install it first:

The method I used and it worked I used pkg. Of course, I don't mean vercel pkg because its development has stopped, but we can use from yao-pkg. It's an active fork of vercel pkg that also supports node20.

I don't remember the details, and cannot find my notes on vercel/pkg. But looking at https://github.com/vercel/pkg right now I see the project has been deprecated in favour of single-executable-applications

> Standalone CLI — we haven’t worked on a standalone CLI for the new engine yet, but will absolutely have it before the v4.0 release.

This part is the most exciting to me. Given the rest of the release announcement, I'm assuming this means that it'll be built in Rust rather than embed Node. While I'm not a Rust zealot of anything, I'm very partial to not embedding Node. Particularly when it depends on using Vercel's now-abandoned pkg[1] tool.`

[1] https://github.com/vercel/pkg

The npm package called "pkg" seems to be the standard for packaging NodeJS applications

https://www.npmjs.com/package/pkg

Unfortunately you also need to bundle all your code into a single file for it to work, but you can use any bundler (webpack, parcel, etc) you want at least

Nodejs support for "single executable applications" is getting there - this issue below is preventing wider adoption at the moment:

"The single executable application feature currently only supports running a single embedded script using the CommonJS module system."

https://nodejs.org/api/single-executable-applications.html

Should be an awesome game changer for node.js when the feature gets rounded out.

Also check out vercel's `pkg`: https://github.com/vercel/pkg/issues/1291

Yes, you can. Check out pkg for a fun option, which can package up your project and Node.js into a single executable.

Further, you could experiment with the pkg tool that allows you to package up Node JS, your source, and your dependencies into one single executable for easy distribution.