z-run VS pkg

I couldn't agree more with you about Ansible... I've started using Ansible in two projects, and I think it was enough for me... Ansible is perhaps great when you have granular tasks, that maybe don't need to communicate between them, or perhaps that don't have too much logic (or worse loops). However, as soon as your Ansible "scripts" start becoming actual "scripts", everything gets out of hand... (Also the performance is terrible due to the fact that each task is "bundled" on the host, copied remotely, extracted, executed, deleted, repeat for each and every instance of the same task...)

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Now about your `tricorder`, by looking at the readme, I gather it just allows one to run the same command over multiple hosts (filtered by name or tag), but nothing beyond that? How could one run for example a pipeline of tools on the remote hosts? (I assume `bash -c 'tool-1 | tool-2'`, but with careful escaping?)

Perhaps a first step towards actually being an "Ansible replacement" would be to bring back in some "scripting" ability. For example instead of giving each command as arguments, there could be a "library of scripts", and the user can choose one of those to run on each remote host. Then those scripts could be written in whatever language the user chooses (`bash`, Python, Ruby, etc.)

Also, with regard to the "library of scripts", one thing that Ansible got right is the possibility to put multiple different tasks in the same file, thus one doesn't need 20 files for 20 small tasks, but instead these can be put inside the same YAML file.

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For example this is how I did it in my own "Ansible replacement", <https://github.com/volution/z-run>, like for example, one can write something like these snippets: <https://github.com/volution/z-run/blob/development/examples/...> (see `ssh / launch / simple` that runs locally which just calls `z-run ssh "${_target}" ':: ssh / remote / main' "${@}"`, which is in itself a non trivial `bash` script, one that will run remotely.)

In the end, what I think we need, is a tool to easily run "scripts" on a remote system, but make it as easy to use as it would be on the local machine. (Sort of like the RPC but across SSH and for scripts.)

Good point!

I'll add to that READMEs, LICENSEs, SBOMs (Software Bill of Materials), example configuration files, etc. How to supply all those files when all one gets is a single binary executable?

Simple! Bundle everything in the executable.

As a bonus, because the tool outputs these files, it can now generated them dynamically. For example instead of a bland configuration file, with all the possible integrations commented out, it could either try to auto-detect where it's running and what's available, or present the user with a question-answer session to fill in the details.

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For example, a pet project of mine <https://github.com/volution/z-run>:

z-run --readme # shows the README with `less` (if on TTY) or to `stdout`

z-run --readme-html # for the HTML version to be opened in `lynx`

z-run --manual # or --manual-man or --manual-html

z-run --sbom # or --sbom-json or --sbom-html

It even gives you the source code:

z-run --sources-cpio | cpio -t

So, does your tool need a `.desktop` file? Just create a flag for that.

Or, if there are too many such extra files needed to be placed wherever provide an `--extras-cpio` and dump them as an archive, or if placing them requires some work, provide an `--extras-install`, but before `sudo`, kindly ask the user for permission.

Granted all this requires some extra work, and increases the bulkiness of the executable, but:

* all that extra code can be extracted into a common library; (I intend to do that for my software;)

* if all these are compressed, especially being text-only, they are a fraction of the final executable;

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I am especially proud of the `--sources-cpio` option. Is something broken with a particular version of the tool that you rely on? Great, instead of bumbling around GitHub to find the particular commit that was used to build this particular version, I can just get the sources from my tool and use those. All I need is the build tools, which in case of Go is another `.tar.gz`.

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.

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