Possibility to reduce packages size by 4x

[pi0]

Hi! Just done a quick test on windows builds. Bundle size can be reduced from 24,964 KB to 6,646 KB (3.75x smaller) with doing simple xz compression. This may even help more when having more npm dependencies. Adding this option may be super useful for small and embedded CLI/Webservers :) I've just opened this discussion before going further to know others idea on this.

UPDATE: To be clear, this topic and what i am talking about is SFX packages not js minification & optimizing.

[pascalandy]

@pi0 Do you see any potential impact your NodeApp's performance?

I'm considering this for my Ghost installation. Cheers!

[roccomuso]

@pi0 How did you do that compression? could you provide an example?

[jgoux]

Hi,

as we're talking about bundle size, does pkg apply some kind of optimization / tree shaking / minification internally?

If I apply something like prepack + uglify before packaging, will my final packaged app be lighter?

[anmonteiro]

running strip on the generated binary should also help on UNIX platforms

[igorklopov]

The idea behind pkg is to introduce minimal changes over original nodejs. Btw, if you run strip you can lose the ability to use native addons (.node files).

[pi0]

Hi. Sorry answering late :)

@pascalandy About performance impact: I think if we do extraction on startup, it may only affect startup time and not run-time itself.

@roccomuso My first test was just using tar! But it would be easy adding self-extract bits on binary's head.(exe inside exe)

@anmonteiro About js minification, pkg is absolutely not webpack! And i don't think this would help a lot, main size suffer is from Node.js binary itself. And we could just make a blind compression on the whole things. (Also @igorklopov is correct about .node files)

[pi0]

Some interesting projects we could get idea/ use:

• https://github.com/megastep/makeself
• http://www.peazip.org/self-extracting-archives.html

[lenovouser]

@anmonteiro strip doesn't really work. It reduces the binary size but the app doesn't run anymore. You get the interactive node console 😆

That is very weird. Why is this happening?

[igorklopov]

strip strips payload that contains your project packed. Without that payload the binary behaves like original node.js binary.

[anmonteiro]

Oh hrm, sorry for the bad suggestion. I use strip with Nexe and it works, apparently it doesn't with pkg's approach. Sorry for the noise

[astefanutti]

Referencing #121 for UPX issue (https://github.com/upx/upx).