ncc VS pkg

During my search for deploying Lambdas via GitHub actions, I came across a tutorial that utilized ncc for converting TypeScript and bundling. While ncc is effective, I discovered esbuild, which proved to be significantly faster and perfectly suited to my requirements.

You could use ncc to compile a binary:

https://github.com/vercel/ncc

This appears to be caused by lazy loading of image layer data, particularly during container initialization, and latency introduced by the read operations. In general, you want to access as few files and as little data as possible during the initialization of your functions. For example, we've seen improvement when using ncc to bundle Node.js applications.

What we do however, is bundle all these dependencies, and our own code into a single JS file using the nifty ncc tool (thanks Vercel!)

Vercel's ncc compiler

The most unclear and confusing part is packing the code using ncc. The necessity of this step is caused by GitHub’s approach to running your Action.

I filed an issue for the ncc bundler regarding a similar behavior

This may be slightly tangential but I recently discovered ncc[1] from vercel which can take a single node project and compile it and all dependencies to a single file.

As an added benefit it also collapses all contained dependencies license files into a single licenses.txt file too!

- [1] https://github.com/vercel/ncc

The current process of building a package locally is by running through a gulp task, using ttypescript to compile the TS and @vercel/ncc to build the binary:

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.

package the app using https://github.com/vercel/pkg and use a smaller base image like alpine, busybox or even scratch (if possible)

Check this thread: https://github.com/vercel/pkg/issues/1685