pkg VS Lean and Mean Docker containers

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

SlimToolkit empowers developers to create better, smaller, and more secure containers without sacrificing their existing workflows. Explore the project on GitHub or visit the official website to learn more.

And if you want to make the container quickly secure without bloats, maybe give this a try https://github.com/slimtoolkit/slim

Slim.ai presents the data in a more user friendly way than many of the other tools in this post. On top of its open source SlimToolkit for identifying the contents of an image, Slim.ai uses Trivy for vulnerability scanning.

What about https://github.com/slimtoolkit/slim?

A last practice that I do not use at all and which may interest you is to use slim toolkit to keep only the useful elements in your final image.

Anyone tried using https://github.com/docker-slim/docker-slim To minify an image?..

Distroless images are better left for people with serious need for lightweight images and good Linux knowledge because they require lot of planning with the build so that they stay light and work. If you need lighter images but docker isn't your main tool and you can't afford to take hours and hours of practicing different build strategies you can check docker-slim (https://dockersl.im/). With this tool you can easily size down the images.