Fossilize

Create self-contained binaries for all platforms supported by Node.js using Node SEA.

Usage

With npx

In the root of your Node.js project

npx fossilize

or just give it your entrypoint file

npx fossilize main.js

As a dev dependency

It is also possible to use fossilize as a dev dependency. Add it to your project first:

npm add --save-dev fossilize

and then add a compile script to your project referencing fossilize:

{
   "scripts": {
      "compile": "fossilize -a some.html -n lts"
   }
}

What is it?

Fossilize is a tool to create Node SEAs (Single Executable Applications) for different platforms. It bundles your Node.js application and its dependencies into a single CJS file using esbuild. Then creates a self-contained binary from that using the Node SEA feature.

It also supports embedding assets either file by file, from a directory, or through a Vite manifest.

Why?

Why would I want a single-executable Node.js application?

If you are building a CLI application using Node.js, it becomes a challenge to distribute it. You may rely on npx which requires Node.js but you'd also need to make sure your app works with many Node.js versions. Your tool being written in JS does not necessarily mean it is for Node.js users but it would require Node.js on their system. With Node SEA, you just give them a self-contained binary without any other system requirements (except for libc) and you are done.

Alternatively, you might be developing a server application that you want to distribute and deploy using Docker. Now you need to maintain a Docker image build pipeline, optimize the image building process based on dependencies, learn how to minimize image size by deleting package manager caches etc. On the other hand, if you distribute your application as a Node SEA, then all you need to do is copy a single binary into a base Linux distro image that has libc (sorry Alpine) and you are good to go.

Why do I need fossilize?

If you go check the documentation for Node SEA, not only you'd see that it is marked as "under active development", you'd also realize that there are these manual and hand-wavy steps that you need to follow to build a Node SEA binary. Just the macOS signing part is a big discovery journey itself whereas if you are using Deno for instance, it is just deno compile.

Yes, we can improve the docs and we probably should but an automated tool is still better.

Why is fossilize itself not a Node SEA?

Oh the irony! I actually tried but there are two main blockers right now:

1. I want to include a bundler and both esbuild and rollup have native components. They do support and have WASM so this is still possible but I just didn't have that time to work on this yet.
2. postject, the library we use to inject your app into the Node.js binary gets confused if you try to inject itself (or some code contains itself). This is most probably solvable with a pull request but that requires time like the item above, which I've yet to spend.

Notes

Currently, it supports signing macOS binaries which is required for them to run on any system. It uses rcodesign for this through the following env variables:

• APPLE_TEAM_ID
• APPLE_CERT_PATH
• APPLE_CERT_PASSWORD
• APPLE_API_KEY_PATH

Further documentation will be added about how to obtain and use these.