How to ship ROS nodes?

edit

I do not know of a 'recommended way'. I would say it depends on your business model and your client's preferences and capabilities.

If you want to give your clients the most flexibility, provide the source code of your package in a standard ROS directory structure ( http://wiki.ros.org/Packages ). Having this your client can modify / reuse your code easier, even under a newer ROS version. The best way to provide source code is probably uploading it to a version control server like github. You could even handle updates this way.

If you would like to hide your source code and provide your client with an easy way to install your package, you might want to provide debian packages and look at question #q192419

If you do not want to deal too much with your client's Ubuntu / ROS setup, then Docker might be an option for you, see: http://wiki.ros.org/docker/Tutorials