I am really new to rom development, however i managed to build a custom rom for galaxy nexus. I obviously dont have gapps.
I am wondering how can i incorporate gapps in the build without having to flash a .zip file?
The apps are not open source and they are prebuilt apk.
Find the APK files for the Google apps that you would like to include. Copy each one under the directory /system/app/ and chmod 644 (change permissions to rwrr). Recompile your ROM and flash it as you'd like.