Guide / Tutorial on Including Additional Executables in Exported Packages

[MichaelrMentele]

Your Godot version:
4.4

Issue description:
I wanted to include an executable in a build to do some custom AI compute. The thought was an autoload could run a small server that can be called into over socket or IPC or file pipe.

However, I had difficulty understanding how to include such executables with my project without doing a manual packaging step myself. It seems like there should be a feature as part of the Godot export template process to include files without forcing them into the PCK.

I'm assuming there is a way to do this, as this seems to be a somewhat common usecase for games.

A tutorial on the topic would be most welcome.

Original unresolved post on discord https://discord.com/channels/1235157165589794909/1413226733028769993

URL to the documentation page (if already existing):

[AThousandShips]

If they're not in the PCK this is pretty strongly outside the scope of the documentation IMO, packaging the game for different platforms like itch or Steam is not something we've documented, and would be very individual, and in the case of distribution platforms that just allow plain downloads it's pretty obvious to just put them in the relevant page or archive

There isn't really any process in the engine to do any of this in an automated fashion, but you can use export plugins

But in the end this is either far too simple to do, if done manually, or far too specific to add to the documentation IMO

[Calinou]

Packaging executables inside a PCK and extracting them before running them is usually discouraged, as this tends to trip up antivirus programs (especially if the executables are not codesigned). The approach is also not cross-platform, since it can't be effectively be used on mobile and web platforms. Using it on macOS is also pretty difficult due to its security model.

The recommended approach is to bundle executables alongside the PCK (or in a subfolder), but it's still not going to be 100% flawless for various other reasons:

• Code signing can still be an issue.
• Antivirus programs can still be an issue, especially if one of the bundled executables is known to run into false positives. You could have an installer that adds Windows Defender exceptions automatically, but that's even more work.
• Linux binary compatibility can be an issue. Is the binary compiled on old enough Linux distribution, or is fully static as per ldd? If not, it's probably not going to run correctly on old Linux distributions, such as Ubuntu 22.04 which is still supported until 2027.

I agree with @AThousandShips this is out of scope for the documentation, as it's more of a general software packaging issue than Godot-specific advice.

[skyace65]

Closing this per Calinou's comment