Recently, we’ve built a small data analysis tool that is intended to work on sensitive medical data. The medical practitioners don’t feel comfortable uploading any of the medical data to a cloud service, so we must ship the code to them. We could build an Electron App or even a CLI tool, but these non-technical users just want a few data entry forms and a submit button. We have built a pretty simple web application, but this still requires us to ship them the site files (zipped), and they still need a runtime (Deno) and some know-how in order to start the entire application.
With Deno 2.1, everything has changed as you can now build a completely self-contained executable with all the assets embedded. Combined with Deno Fresh, this has significantly lowered the barrier for on-premises application deployment.
In this short tutorial, I’ll show you how to create a simple Deno Fresh application and package it as a single executable.
My First Fresh Application
Deno Fresh is a no-overhead, just-in-time rendering web application framework with client hydration for highly interactive websites. Your entire web application can be written in TypeScript using Preact components, with simple file-based routing, and no JS is shipped to the client by default. There is a ton of information on their website, which, of course, is entirely built with Fresh.
To create your first Fresh site, install Deno and run deno run -A -r https://fresh.deno.dev.
Running Your Site
The setup script will setup a simple Fresh website along with a deno.json with a few useful tasks:
"tasks": {
"check": "deno fmt --check && deno lint && deno check **/*.ts && deno check **/*.tsx",
"cli": "echo \"import '\\$fresh/src/dev/cli.ts'\" | deno run --unstable -A -",
"manifest": "deno task cli manifest $(pwd)",
"start": "deno run -A --watch=static/,routes/ dev.ts",
"build": "deno run -A dev.ts build",
"preview": "deno run -A main.ts",
"update": "deno run -A -r https://fresh.deno.dev/update ."
},
You can test the website using deno start and when you are ready to deploy it, use deno build.
Compiling the Site
To ship the site as a single executable, use the deno compile command. There are several command-line options, including the target for which you wish to build.
To compile the Fresh site, use:
deno compile --include static --include _fresh --include deno.json -A main.ts
Compile the Entire Fresh Site
Finally, I decided to try compiling the entire Deno Fresh website. I cloned the Git Repository and executed the following three commands:
$ cd www
$ deno task build
$ deno compile --include static --include _fresh --include deno.json -A main.ts