nexe VS pkg

We can make an executable of the Next.js process using something like [Nexe (https://github.com/nexe/nexe) and run that on the destination server along with the other executables. But this solution has problems:

In addition to the other responses, there are node packages like pkg and nexe that you can use to package the node executable and your code into a single executable.

well... you need the code on the server in some way in order to run it. Nodejs doesn't compile to a binary. There are ways to wrap a node install and the code into a binary. But I have never used that in production and can't actually recommend it.

yes, you can even compile your js if you want a single executable, with things like nexe

https://github.com/nexe/nexe is another.

You mean something like this:

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

or perhaps this one:

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

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.