Welcome to context, The standalone context distribution has the following structure. Installations like texlive use a different organization. tex/texmf-context : the files in this tree (zip) tex/texmf-/bin : the tex binaries and runners tex/texmf-modules : optional user installed modules tex/texmf-project : user project files tex/texmf-fonts/data/ : user installed fonts There is only one binary: luametatex, two if you also have luatex, so the amount of binary code is rather small. The mtxrun and context runners (stubs) are links but when that doesn't work you can make copies luametatex (which is not that large anyway). Because luametatex is also its own runner, there are no dependencies on other binaries. luametatex[.exe] : the main tex binary, also runner [around 3MB] mtxrun[.exe] : a (sym)link to luametatex context[.exe] : a (sym)link to luametatex mtxrun.lua : the main runner code context.lua : the context runner code luatex[.exe] : optional The lua files have to be alongside its runner. Wrapping a runner in some launcher makes no sense and is not supported. The whole idea is to have one single independent framework that is the same on all main platforms (windows, linux, osx). The mtxrun runner also handles the other mtx-* scripts that are in the context tree, which is why we have only a few files in the binary path. It also reduces the risk for clashes in binary names. An installation can be done using the installer but also by unzipping the archive or fetching from github (contextgarden). You can, if needed, compile the binary yourself from the includes source code. All tex resources (smacros, styles, fonts, patterns, etc.) are located relative to the binary path so you only need to make sure that the binary is in the path. The project and font trees can be shared (using links) and are untouched by the installers. By keeping fonts in the tree you retain stability, By using the project tree you can make sure that your styles are found when you process files outside the tex tree. After installing you need to run 'mtxrun --generate' so that a successive 'context' run can find the files it needs. You can get help and more information on the context garden, mailing lists and user forums cq. platforms.