Packing Sheets with pkg
pkg
1 is a tool for generating command-line tools that embed scripts.
SheetJS is a JavaScript library for reading and writing data from spreadsheets.
This demo uses pkg
and SheetJS to create a standalone CLI tool for parsing
spreadsheets and converting to other formats.
With the official release of NodeJS SEA, Vercel opted
to deprecate pkg
. It is still useful for deploying apps embedding NodeJS v18
or earlier since those versions do not support NodeJS SEA.
This demo was tested in the following deployments:
Architecture | Version | NodeJS | Date |
---|---|---|---|
darwin-x64 | 5.8.1 | 18.5.0 | 2024-05-28 |
darwin-arm | 5.8.1 | 18.5.0 | 2024-05-25 |
win10-x64 | 5.8.1 | 18.5.0 | 2024-04-18 |
win11-arm | 5.8.1 | 18.5.0 | 2024-05-28 |
linux-x64 | 5.8.1 | 18.5.0 | 2024-03-21 |
linux-arm | 5.8.1 | 18.5.0 | 2024-05-26 |
Integration Details
The SheetJS NodeJS module can be
required from scripts. pkg
will automatically handle packaging.
Script Requirements
Scripts that exclusively use SheetJS libraries and NodeJS built-in modules can
be bundled using pkg
.
The demo script xlsx-cli.js
runs in NodeJS. It
is a simple command-line tool for reading and writing spreadsheets.
Limitations
When this demo was last tested, pkg
failed with an error referencing node20
:
> Targets not specified. Assuming:
node20-linux-arm64, node20-macos-arm64, node20-win-arm64
> Error! No available node version satisfies 'node20'
pkg
does not support NodeJS 20 or 22!
The local NodeJS version must be rolled back to version 18.
If nvm
or nvm-windows
was used to install NodeJS:
nvm install 18
nvm use 18
Otherwise, on macOS and Linux, n
can manage the global installation:
sudo npm i -g n
sudo n 18
On Windows, it is recommended to use a prebuilt installer2
Complete Example
-
Downgrade NodeJS to major version 18 or earlier.
-
Download the test file https://docs.sheetjs.com/pres.numbers:
curl -o pres.numbers https://docs.sheetjs.com/pres.numbers
- Download
xlsx-cli.js
curl -o xlsx-cli.js https://docs.sheetjs.com/cli/xlsx-cli.js
- Install the dependencies:
- npm
- pnpm
- Yarn
npm i --save https://cdn.sheetjs.com/xlsx-0.20.3/xlsx-0.20.3.tgz exit-on-epipe commander@2
pnpm install --save https://cdn.sheetjs.com/xlsx-0.20.3/xlsx-0.20.3.tgz exit-on-epipe commander@2
yarn add https://cdn.sheetjs.com/xlsx-0.20.3/xlsx-0.20.3.tgz exit-on-epipe commander@2
- Create the standalone program:
npx pkg xlsx-cli.js
This generates xlsx-cli-linux
, xlsx-cli-macos
, and xlsx-cli-win.exe
.
- Run the generated program, passing
pres.numbers
as the argument:
- Linux
- macOS
- Windows
./xlsx-cli-linux pres.numbers
./xlsx-cli-macos pres.numbers
.\xlsx-cli-win.exe pres.numbers
Footnotes
-
The project does not have a website. The source repository is publicly available. ↩
-
The NodeJS website hosts prebuilt installers. ↩