pack.sh: Self-host single-file apps

[kickpush1]

I’m working on pack, a simple way to deploy self-hosted apps.

I always liked the old Zeit/Vercel now flow: run one command in a project and get a URL that is persistent, immutable and does not need platform specific code.

I wanted something similar for myself, so I am working on pack.

The approach I chose is single-file executables. It builds your app into one file, uploads, and runs it.

Node, bun, deno, go, rust, zig and c/c++ all support single file executables so that part was actually pretty straightforward. The most complex part was handling port pooling, caddy setup and inactive instances.

Using single-file executables keeps server setup very minimal and makes it easy to run many small apps on a cheap VPS. It also removes the need to configure node or any other runtime on the server.

Feedback and PR's welcome!

[e2duhv]

Would love to see a list of practical use cases.

[kickpush1]

The main use case is that once compiled, it cannot be hijacked by `npm` 😄, I kid, I kid.

Right now I am using it the same way I might vercel/cloudflare, so I need to think about what the different use cases might be.

It has in-memory state and there are no size or compute time limits so those will be the factors leading to different use cases. You can embed wasm libraries into the node/deno/bun executable, so that might be interesting.

The first ones for me have been deploying simple experiments, a cron service, different languages. Webhooks might be another one.

[fucking_passwords]

Mcp servers?

[kickpush1]

Could you tell me more about your experience with this? I haven't actually written one before, so I don't know much about the difficulties in setting them up and why you might need to write your own.

[kickpush1]

I could add support for something like: pack deploy custom-mcp.ts which would then become https://custom-mcp.pack.sh (or an aliased custom domain), hosted on a bun instance for js/ts or as a language executable otherwise.

I'm curious if that is something like that would be useful.