I believe App Engine Flexible (neé Managed VMs) does this (source: I looked at the code a while back). Basically your package.json (or requirements.txt for Pyth

I believe App Engine Flexible (neé Managed VMs) does this (source: I looked at the code a while back). Basically your package.json (or requirements.txt for Python, etc) and your code get sent up as part of gcloud app deploy, and then a builder VM does the npm install bits for you, before producing your output "code plus packages" container that it stores in GCR (Google container registry). This isn't just for fun though, if you're writing code on a Mac and deploying to App Engine, it's not very enjoyable to produce the x86-64 ELF libs you may need for your dependencies (I do admit this is why Vagrant, Virtual Box, etc. became so popular). All that said, I'm not sure if the result of that is as minimal as we'd like ("final artifacts"). There's probably some amount of extra cruft, but certainly no more than roll your own.