Release standalone versions without a node requirement

[henrikbjorn]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.

In many development environments there is a desire to not install node and a lot of node packages e.g. Rails, Symfony, Laravel. This was also a "problem" with Tailwind until recently.

They have started doing standalone builds using https://github.com/vercel/pkg. This lets e.g. rubygems developers to include the binaries directly for the platforms and thus not require a separate nodejs build pipeline.

Describe the solution you'd like
Bulid mjml with https://github.com/vercel/pkg

Describe alternatives you've considered
Try and find an alternative no mjlm which might be hard to hear, but is a reality when scoping for solutions to a problem.

Additional context
Tailwind: https://tailwindcss.com/blog/standalone-cli
Tailwind-rails https://github.com/rails/tailwindcss-rails

Someone playing with this idea previously vercel/pkg#618

[henrikbjorn]

Doing a quick test (assuming that pkg is installed and that mjml is build)

$ pkg packages/mjml
> pkg@5.5.2
> Targets not specified. Assuming:
  node16-linux-x64, node16-macos-x64, node16-win-x64

and then

$ ./mjml-macos --version
mjml-core: 4.12.0
mjml-cli: 4.12.0
$ ./mjml-macos -i input.mjml 
# spits out https://gist.github.com/henrikbjorn/df1f159249117a8b876336986614f49d#file-input-mjml

Seems to work out of the box

[iRyusa]

I'm not against adding a binary version of MJML at release if it doesn't add much overhead as a we have already a browser build.

I wonder if .mjmlconfig and custom component works tho ? I guess it has some limitation that we need to document if we provide such build

[henrikbjorn]

@iRyusa I think the limitations is that the dependencies needs to be loadable. e.g. for custom component there would be a need for a package.json file the components as dependencies.

The binaries produced are ~50mb in size and it takes 10s to create the 3 standard platforms from my tests.

[henrikbjorn]

My understanding is that the binary just includes node, and everything node can load, it should be able to load also. Tailwind uses tailwind.config.js so it can load .mjmlconfig

[henrikbjorn]

I can see that Tailwind have a custom package that includes some of their most used plugins. In order to make the standalone version usable for the vast majority https://github.com/tailwindlabs/tailwindcss/blob/master/standalone-cli/standalone.js

[iRyusa]

If someone willing to do a PR on this I'm fine with this 👍 .
Does it have any positive impact on perf (boot time) ?

[henrikbjorn]

@iRyusa I think it is hard to do a PR since it requires some workflow etc etc. If it just is creating the pkg and using upload artifact then i can do one rather quickly.

[iRyusa]

As we have many things to handle and we're a small team I don't think we can take much effort supporting this binary. I'm closing