Creating multi-platform/arch Single Executable Applications (SEA)

[humphd]

I'm using (and loving!) the new node single executable applications feature to make a binary for my node CLI. Such a cool and useful feature, thank you.

I now need to create the same binary for multiple platforms/archs and I'm wondering if it's possible to do this all on my Linux machine; that is, can I create a Mac or Windows binary (possibly minus the code signing stuff)?

The process appears to be mostly generic:

• create the sea-config.json file
• turn it into a blob with node --experimental-sea-config sea-config.json (question: does the node I use here have to be the same one I'll later inject into, or can I use my system node? Does this command do anything specific to a platform/arch or is the blob generic?)
• copy the node binary to use (I assume I could download a different node binary for another platform/arch here)
• remove the signature (not sure how I'd do this cross-platform)
• inject the blob into the binary with npx postject, with some tweaks per platform. I read the code for this, and postject appears to be able to determine the type of binary, so I assume this part can work on any binary type?
• sign the binary (again, not sure about this for cross-platform)

Thanks for helping me understand what is and isn't possible here. I could spin up multiple CI runners with specific platform/arch, but I'd love to be able to do this all from Linux if I can.

[liudonghua123]

I love this feature, I wrote a simple cli app named node-sea to simplify the sea package work a few months ago, but it lacks of cross-compilation feature.

I also forked pkg to continue support node 20/21 and later which support the simlar feature.

[humphd]

@liudonghua123 it's great that you're working on keeping this stuff going. For the code signing bit, I recently found https://github.com/mtrojnar/osslsigncode, which might be promising.

[humphd]

https://github.com/indygreg/apple-platform-rs also looks interesting

[humphd]

So it seems like with some combination of https://gregoryszorc.com/docs/apple-codesign/main/ and https://github.com/mtrojnar/osslsigncode, it should be possible to do this all from a Linux machine.

[mkhurramali]

I have posted a webpack plugin here: https://www.npmjs.com/package/sea-webpack-plugin

This does cross-platform builds for the sea applications and has a docker you can use to do code signing.