Ran out of comment room. 🙂
No, I believe they need to be untared. Same principal as a deployment server. There will be settings that you need to set prior to the apps being deployed. Not all the nodes in a distributed environment need the same files, you will notice that there are some apps call TA's. These would mainly be the files needed for an indexer or a forwarder. An example would be the indexers and forwarders do not need to know about the web interface configuration files. You could put an exact copy of each app on all nodes. But all the configuration files will be used and only take up space.
As stated before, the local configurations will need to be done before deployment of the app. An example of this would be on a deployment server. You would create the app. Create the local settings that you need set and prepare the app for deployment, then edit the serverclass.conf file to add that app and to whom it should go to. With a deploy-server reload when the nodes check back in the server will then send the new app to those that need the app.
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