Creating an installer for an app. [Answered]
Bizarrely this is something I've never actually bothered with, but what's the best way to create an installer that publishes + bundles all your projects together? I have a WPF app and a 2nd CLI tool for updating the WPF app.
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I don't really want to roll my own thing from scratch if something already exists to do this, only custom installer steps I need is adding a startup registry key
try nsis or advanced installer
don't think I'd be able to use either with CI, which might be an issue
i use wix
its a bit too complex but you only need to make the base installer once
also have to figure out how to create a wix project because Rider doesn't support WiX projects out of the box it looks like
eh, WiX does seem like a nightmare, wonder how hard it is to roll my own
big challenge will be embedding the publish output of the other two projects in the installer project before building 🤔
theres also the one from github i forgot what it was called
https://github.com/Squirrel/Squirrel.Windows
ah squirrel I have heard of actually, my memory was a bit hazy on it
https://github.com/clowd/Clowd.Squirrel useful to know for future reference that the original is way out of date
still only runs on framework 4.5
ah good to know thanks
ive never used it actually
:ooo gonna mark that down, looks very interesting
quite a pain in the ass to work with so far
though WiX looked worse, so we'll see
cool, keep us updated
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managed to get it working with github releases after a little bit of messing around, it's frankly awesome
the only downside is that the installer it creates seems to be silent only
but other than that https://github.com/sirdoombox/F1Desktop/releases I managed to get a v1.0.0 build to update to v1.0.1, it's excellent
just need to see if the
RELEASES file is necessary to include or if that's just a helpful utility
ah it is indeed, the only thing I have to figure out now is how to use GitHub Actions to build the release branch, install the squirrel CLI tool, download the latest release (so it can generate patches) and basically I have it all sorted
after a few hours I finally managed to get it to build via GitHub's Actions and publish it
auto-updater and stuff works flawlessly out of the box
all I have to do is tag a commit and push that tag to the remote and it'll create a release for me✅ This post has been marked as answered!
Sick! I'll take a look at it later, might come in handy
my repo has the workflow which involves a couple extra steps of trimming a text file and dumping some unnecessary old version files and stuff, other than that it's pretty simple to set up