build a self-contained exe, without installer?

[rombat]

Hi
I have a personal project which is a CLI tool based on nodejs, and packaged as a .exe file with @yao-pkg/pkg. I'm thinking about adding a GUI, and ideally I'd like to keep a single .exe file for both CLI and GUI.
Your project seems to be interesting, but i was wondering if it could be feasible with it, given that the built exe is an installer.

[1Jamie]

Hi @rombat

This is a great use case, though there are some technical nuances to be aware of.

Currently, Lotus builds as a Node.js native addon (NAPI-RS) that interfaces with the Rust/Servo rendering core. While we currently use an installer to manage the environment and ANGLE DLLs, you can certainly distribute it as a "portable" folder.

Regarding a single .exe:
SEA Limitation: Node's native Single Executable Application (SEA) support currently does not support bundling .node native modules. Since Lotus is a native bridge, a pure SEA approach isn't viable right now. Most systems compiling to a single .exe with Node cannot do this without a custom workaround. Even electron is actually kinda lying to you, its an archive that when you execute it its really just unpacking itself and running the unpacked stuff. Though i could also try this approach and im not against it.

The Dependency Hurdle: I don't know of any projects at the moment that can successfully bundle the ANGLE DLLs, the MSVC++ redistributables, and the .node modules into a single binary while maintaining functionality. If you are aware of any, please do link me! I’d love to explore single-file portability.

The Portable Path:
The most realistic approach is a self-contained directory. The "beauty" is also the same reason we can't do a single executable yet: it's just a Node native module. As long as the MSVC++ redistributable is present, it should just run by triggering the main.js in Node as long as its basically a copy of your dev env with the ANGLE dlls. Though this has made me aware i would like to also pursue the ability to build .zips or folders that just contain everything needed to run it on windows or the target platform. this is a great spot i could expand my systems, thank you for bringing this to my attention!

I'm currently hardening the Windows build pipeline to make dependency management (like those extra DLLs) more robust for these portable use cases.

also apologies for taking a week to respond, i have a huge update coming adding a compositor and allowing for multiple views in the same window so i was a bit preoccupied, sorry about that.