Package standalone binaries via @vercel/pkg

[Paul Taylor (trxcllnt)]

This PR is an attempt to address #7 (comment).

Publishing a standalone devcontainer binary that can be installed into images/machines w/o node would be super helpful.

pkg can't statically analyze dynamic require calls, so I use static node-pty requires when bundling for use w/ pkg. pkg warns about other dynamic requires (seemingly from yargs), so we should validate these aren't executed at runtime.

• Add a package-standalone npm script to create standalone [win, linux] x [amd64, arm64] binaries
• Update the CLI unit tests to invoke either the npm-pack'd package or the standalone binary
• Update the GitHub action workflows to build, upload, and test the standalone binaries
• Passes linux-x64 and win-x64 tests 🎉

I have a separate branch that adds macOS binaries and updates the GHA workflows to build/test/publish them. I've held off merging it into this PR because it's a huge change to dev-containers.yml and publish-dev-containers.yml, but I can if folks are comfortable reviewing it all together.

edit: I've updated the release action to create GH releases w/ the new artifacts (see this sample release).

edit 2: I've opened a draft PR with the workflow changes in #385

[Diptesh (IgnisDa)]

Paul Taylor (@trxcllnt) Any updates on this?

[Paul Taylor (trxcllnt)]

Diptesh (@IgnisDa) From my perspective this PR is complete (especially if the maintainers are comfortable w/ merging in the additional workflow changes in this branch). I'm just waiting on maintainer reviews/approval to run the CI jobs.

[Paul Taylor (trxcllnt)]

Diptesh (@IgnisDa) I don't know the right people to @ for attention, but feel free to comment if you do.

[Diptesh (IgnisDa)]

Unfortunately, neither do I, but thanks for your work!

[Roman (Roemer)]

Any news here? This would still be very very useful in many cases.

[Nathan Brinks (nbrinks)]

Very interested in an official standalone binary. Also, noticed the vercel/pkg repo was archived back in January of 2024.

[Roman (Roemer)]

I thought about starting to port the CLI to golang to make it rather easy to have a standalone binary (even static linked) for all systems available. I am familiar with golang enough but lack some time to do it all by myself. I could setup the repo and create the initial structure and cli application with some very basic functionaliy and if some people would join, I guess we would have something available fairly quickly.