What happened?

The Bun-compiled pi binary opens several files relative to its executable's parent directory at startup, instead of resolving them from the embedded $bunfs or via import.meta.dir. When the binary is shipped without its surrounding tree (e.g. as a Tauri sidecar, or any single-file distribution), startup fails.

Concrete files we hit, in order:

1. <bindir>/package.json
   • init_config does JSON.parse(readFileSync(getPackageJsonPath(), "utf-8"))
2. <bindir>/theme/dark.json, <bindir>/theme/light.json
   • getBuiltinThemes() → themesDir = getThemesDir() resolves to <bindir>/theme/
3. Likely more we didn't reach (presumably assets/, extension scaffolding, etc.)

ENOENT: no such file or directory, open '/.../pi-install/package.json'
  at <anonymous> (/$bunfs/root/pi:961:32)

ENOENT: no such file or directory, open '/.../pi-install/theme/dark.json'
  at getBuiltinThemes (/$bunfs/root/pi:202327:40)
  at loadThemeJson  (/$bunfs/root/pi:202429:41)
  at loadTheme      (/$bunfs/root/pi:202484:34)
  at initTheme      (/$bunfs/root/pi:202558:29)
  at main           (/$bunfs/root/pi:288472:12)

Context

Integrating @earendil-works/pi-coding-agent as a Tauri sidecar for a desktop chat UI. Build:

npm view @earendil-works/pi-coding-agent dist.tarball | xargs curl -L | tar xz
cd package && bun install && bun build --compile ./dist/bun/cli.js --outfile pi

If we ship just pi next to a .app and spawn it from anywhere, it crashes on the reads above. The workaround is to also ship the entire package/ tree (theme/, dist/, node_modules/, package.json) alongside the binary and spawn pi from that directory — ~260 MB instead of ~70 MB.

Related

• Binary has trouble supporting extensions #681 — same theme/ symptom; closed as a mise tarball-flattening workaround, but the underlying "binary expects sibling files" behavior is what bites all single-file consumers.
• Compiled binary cannot start outside repo after proxy-from-env change #4513 / compiled bun binary fails outside repo: Cannot find package 'proxy-from-env' #4490 — different but adjacent (proxy-from-env not resolvable from $bunfs). Together these show pi's compiled binary isn't truly self-contained.

Expected behavior

The compiled binary should be runnable from any cwd with no sibling files on disk. Bun supports this via Bun.embeddedFiles / import.meta.dir referring to /$bunfs/root/.... Specifically:

• getPackageJsonPath() should return an embedded asset, or version metadata should be a compile-time constant.
• getThemesDir() should resolve to the embedded theme dir, or themes should be inlined as imported JSON modules.

If embedding is undesirable, document the required sibling layout (package.json + theme/ + assets/ at minimum) so integrators can ship a deterministic tree.

Steps to reproduce

mkdir /tmp/pi-test && cd /tmp/pi-test
TARBALL=$(npm view @earendil-works/pi-coding-agent dist.tarball)
curl -fsSL "$TARBALL" | tar xz
cd package && bun install --silent
bun build --compile ./dist/bun/cli.js --outfile /tmp/pi-test/pi
cd /tmp                                  # leave the install tree
/tmp/pi-test/pi --mode rpc               # ENOENT on package.json

Version

Latest published @earendil-works/pi-coding-agent as of 2026-05-28; Bun 1.3.8 on macOS arm64. Same behavior reproducible on Linux per the issue trail above.