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We do it right now, though we run Node instead of Go. For us it's not 'copy a binary', but 'copy and untar', but it's still very simple. One downside that we f

We do it right now, though we run Node instead of Go. For us it's not 'copy a binary', but 'copy and untar', but it's still very simple. One downside that we find surprizing is that way too many Ops people are more familiar or comfortable in cloud or Kubernetes environments these days. We find it hard to find local talent who are willing to deal with bare metal hardware. Because of that we plan to migrate to k8s at some point later this year. I'm neither support nor oppose it, to be honest. Introducing an extra Docker build step is annoying, but the idea of adding a few hundreds of Yaml lines to get monitoring, log aggregation, tracing, etc. sounds really nice, too.

arnvald 5y ago
How do you do that with Node: do you ship Node binary and all packages together with each app in one tar file? Or do you manage Node versions on the server that runs the apps?
- xrd 5y ago
  pkg "compiles" your app into a binary with a virtual file system inside the app. If you do a "require", the runtime rewrites that call and attempts to load the files from inside the sandbox virtual file system. You can even provide assets (like say a JS app and associated HTML, CSS) that are stored inside the app. You can then build a full app as a single binary with no extra dependencies or files. There are a few gotchas like when you need native library support in your app (if you are using a sqlite driver) and then you need to ship a .node file with your app. But, generally, it is a great solution once you get the hang of it. You compile against a specific version of node, and that runtime is included in your binary. You don't need the client to install node or choose a version, you lock that down when you build your app. I've experimented with a lot of different nodejs packaging tools, but pkg seems to work the best with the fewest surprises.
Xunjin 5y ago
You know there are some projects like vercel/pkg which allows you to "bundle" everything inside a single binary, you don't even need the Nose run-time, of course there is some downsides, tho it's pretty solid.

arnvald 5y ago

How do you do that with Node: do you ship Node binary and all packages together with each app in one tar file? Or do you manage Node versions on the server that runs the apps?

xrd 5y ago
pkg "compiles" your app into a binary with a virtual file system inside the app. If you do a "require", the runtime rewrites that call and attempts to load the files from inside the sandbox virtual file system. You can even provide assets (like say a JS app and associated HTML, CSS) that are stored inside the app. You can then build a full app as a single binary with no extra dependencies or files. There are a few gotchas like when you need native library support in your app (if you are using a sqlite driver) and then you need to ship a .node file with your app. But, generally, it is a great solution once you get the hang of it. You compile against a specific version of node, and that runtime is included in your binary. You don't need the client to install node or choose a version, you lock that down when you build your app. I've experimented with a lot of different nodejs packaging tools, but pkg seems to work the best with the fewest surprises.

Xunjin 5y ago

You know there are some projects like vercel/pkg which allows you to "bundle" everything inside a single binary, you don't even need the Nose run-time, of course there is some downsides, tho it's pretty solid.