Compile Node.js to Native Binaries

Guillermo Rauch (Socket.io, Mangoose.js, Hyper.js, Now) is the guy to watch, and last night he did not disappoint. The following tweet announced pkg – a simple tool to generate a native executable file from Node.js code targeting Mac, Linux, and Windows.

Introducing `pkg`

Single command binary compilation for Node.js pic.twitter.com/Dbe9L1gb0x

— ZEIT (@zeithq) April 29, 2017

To try it out, I decided to re-implement the ls -alh command, that would display all files in the current folder, as well as their size in a human readable format.

Node already supports getting a list of files fs.readdirSync and their size fs.statSync.

I’ve installed a 3rd party library called filesize to convert the byte sizes to a human readable format.

The final program – ls.js – only took me 5 minutes to write and looked as such:

const fs = require('fs');
const filesize = require('filesize');

var files = fs.readdirSync('./');
files.forEach(file => {
  let fsize = filesize(fs.statSync(file).size)

  console.log(`${file} - ${fsize}`);
});

Next I installed pkg, via npm install -g pkg.

Finally, I ran the pkg ls.js command to generate the binaries. Since I didn’t specify a specific target, pkg built binaries for 3 default platforms – Mac, Linux, and Windows.

I’ve run my generated executable ./ls-macos and got the following output:

The generated files are kind of big, but considering how easy it was to generate a binary while leveraging npm, I think it is a worthy trade off. I am excited about the project and see a lot of potential.

May be next time my mom is having a computer problem, I can send her a binary to execute 🙂