Sometimes you can’t just npm install -g <solution>. If node.js and npm aren’t already installed, how can you get that same level of instant gratification? What do you do if you can't install either of those? What if you could add a module to an email as a single file attachment? Sometimes you just need that convenience of standalone executables: the runtime, the application and its dependencies in a single file. As it turns out, this has been supported by node natively since 2011 but lacks documentation and requires a bit of fiddling. This is a story about my recent adventures in node core, node-webkit, and black magic to figure this out.
Sometimes you can’t just
npm install -g <solution>. If node.js and npm aren’t already installed, how can you get that same level of instant gratification? What do you do if you can't install either of those? What if you could add a module to an email as a single file attachment? Sometimes you just need that convenience of standalone executables: the runtime, the application and its dependencies in a single file. As it turns out, this has been supported by node natively since 2011 but lacks documentation and requires a bit of fiddling. This is a story about my recent adventures in node core, node-webkit, and black magic to figure this out.