shopify-app-cli VS pkg

You are missing a few things about the Ruby based CLI:

1. dependencies for Gems are specified in the gemspec file and not the Gemfile. See https://github.com/Shopify/shopify-cli/blob/main/shopify-cli... for example. There's a few non-development dependencies.

2. since it's difficult to package up a Ruby gem for distribution, maybe dependencies were vendored directly in the codebase: https://github.com/Shopify/shopify-cli/tree/main/vendor

This isn't meant to be a comparison of the number of dependencies or anything. Just pointing out a few nuances to how the Ruby dependencies were handled.

See this GitHub issue for other recommendations

#1922: Respect RUBY_BINDIR from Homebrew for installing gem

For sure. So I'm building a Shopify app and used the CLI to scaffold the project. I'm going to keep digging into it but wasn't sure if there was something easy I just wasn't seeing

Download the .rpm file from the releases page2. Install the downloaded file

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