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> Is there any good way to bundle up, say, a Flask app on Gunicorn into a single, minimal-dependency executable?

You don't need to build a single executable for this approach to work. You could use something like buildroot to build your runtime docker image.

docker-nano was doing something to that effect, see for example nano/node.js: https://github.com/Docker-nano/Node.js

To track down dependencies, "strace" is your friend. And no, that's not an ideal solution, but it works reasonably well. Couple that with "ldd" on the interpreter.

For Ruby, additionally "bundle install --standalone --path [..]" gets your far.

it's possible to do this with PEX. I've done this experimentally by subclassing gunicorn.app.base.Application. Haven't tried it out in prod yet though.