Bundle a Bare app

A Bare program ships in one of two shapes depending on where it runs: as an embeddable bundle loaded by a worklet inside a native app, or as a standalone executable with no peer dependencies. This guide covers both, plus where native addons fit in.

Embeddable bundle with bare-pack

bare-pack traverses your module graph and produces a single bare-bundle with import specifiers pre-resolved and addons and assets embedded. Build one for the platform you're embedding into:

npm i -g bare-pack

bare-pack --linked --host ios --out app.bundle.mjs app.js

Two flags matter for mobile: --host <platform>[-<arch>[-<environment>]] targets a specific system (pass it more than once for a combined bundle), and --linked makes addons resolve to linked: specifiers—required on iOS and Android, which link native code ahead of time rather than loading it from disk at runtime.

Load the result in a worklet by giving start() a filename with the .bundle extension:

import { Worklet } from 'react-native-bare-kit'
import bundle from './app.bundle.mjs'

const worklet = new Worklet()
worklet.start('/app.bundle', bundle)

Standalone executable with bare-build

bare-build packages your code as a native application bundle or a standalone executable for desktop and mobile. It ships portable runtimes for every supported system, so the output runs with no Node.js, Bare, or Pear CLI installed:

npm i -g bare-build

bare-build \
  --host darwin-arm64 --host darwin-x64 \
  --standalone \
  --identifier com.example.App \
  app.js

The output format depends on platform and mode—--standalone emits a self-extracting executable (Mach-O on macOS/iOS, ELF on Linux/Android, PE on Windows), while --package emits an installer (.pkg, .AppImage, .msix, …).

This is the path the hello-pear-bare template wires behind npm run make, which detects your host and builds the matching target.

Native addons and prebuilt runtimes

Native addons are compiled separately with bare-make (a CMake-based generator using Ninja + Clang); bare-pack then embeds the results. To build addons for every platform you ship to, the Bare native-addon prebuild actions run bare-make across a CI matrix. If you only need the runtime itself, bare-runtime provides prebuilt Bare binaries for macOS, iOS, Linux, Android, and Windows.

See also

• Embed Bare in a React Native app—load the bundle in a worklet.
• Start from the hello-pear-bare template—a terminal app that builds standalone with bare-build.
• Bare modules—bare-pack, bare-bundle, bare-make, and the rest of the build tooling.
• One core, many platforms—why the embeddable-bundle path exists.