Our product has several products that customer can install created as separate installation packages (MSI).
We have a requirement to have single package for the installation that will:
Show one UI with progress
Allow user to choose which features/packages to install
Have ability to constrain one feature to another (e.g removing or adding effect other)
Support single elevation (UAC)
nice to have ability to auto update (not must)
support command line + silent installation
the package should be built out of the isolated installations (chain them)
raise error / messages for missing prerequisites
Support patches over time and major upgrades
Today we do almost all of the above using MSI with nested installations which is bad practice and we face too many issues in our solution.
i know that there are several bootstrappers out there (m$ generic bootstrapper which i think is not good, BURN is the WIX version which is not mature enough)
Do you know of other? that work and tested already ?
What is the best method to do (without unification of the MSI into a single MSI)
dotNetInstaller looks promising. I was experimenting with it to install java as a prerequisite. It comes with a GUI editor so you don't have to sort out the xml to create a project. The config file is in xml, and the InstallerLinker can be run from the command line. It could be integrated with a build server, though some msbuild tasks would be nice.
project home:
http://dotnetinstaller.codeplex.com/
tutorial:
http://www.codeproject.com/KB/install/dotNetInstaller.aspx
Create an InstallShield InstallScript package. Use the InstallScript package kick off the .MSIs with "-qn" one by one. I do this and am successful with it. I believe it meets your all the requirements you listed.
Until Wix's Burn is ready we really don't have much of a choice when it comes to bootstrappers.
If you are using InstallShield as your msi designer, one thing you could try is making an InstallScript project that contains all the different msi packages. You could then silently install only the desired packages. InstallShield is pretty expensive though, so if you don't already have it, you'll probably have to end up rolling your own bootstrapper.
Related
I have three products which have their installers in .exe files.
Let us say the installers for the three three products are
Product_A.exe
Product_B.exe
Product_C.exe
I want to create a msi file using wix toolset which will install these three exe installers.
What is the best way to do this?
I want to also fail my MSI in case any of the three exe fails to install.
I am new to these so please help.
Any example would be highly appreciated
I also plan to uninstall these products once I uninstall my msi.
Thanks in advance for any help
Tools: There are a number of tools available for MSI creation. Some commercial and WiX - the open source solution. Here is a quick summary of tools. The commercial tools are excellent but expensive, WiX (free, open source) is also excellent but has a learning curve (XML text sources). Remember that a setup consultant can help you make such packages pretty quickly in most cases, but you might need the knowledge in-house. Long review of tools.
Cohesion & Coupling: You might need to create 3 different MSIs to install these products, or you could put them all in the same MSI. Here are some considerations to decide what to do. Remember to not be dogmatic but practical - what will work best for your particular case? You can allow only some of the tools to be installed by exposing features in the MSI you make - allowing only some features to be installed from a single MSI. Feature sample screenshot.
Setup.exe: There is also functionality to allow a setup.exe bootstrapper / installer launcher to install multiple MSI files wrapped inside it in sequence. WiX has the Burn component, and commercial tools have various options for the same (InstallShield Suite Projects, prerequisites, etc... - info here).
Details: As to the actual setups. You need to determine what they actually install (bullet point 3) - prerequisites and all (COM, COM+, GAC, Java, VC++ runtime, etc...). That might or might not be available to you via 1) documentation of in-house expertise (developers). 2) You can extract files from the setup to look at (check if they are MSI files already coming out of the setup.exe!), 3) install the setups and inspect the application operation with dependency / profiling tools. 4) The best is to find the old setup scripts used to compile the old setup exes. 5) You can also "capture" old setup EXE files to auto-convert to MSI. This needs serious cleanup at times from experts and it requires expensive tools - generally. See more info here. There are probably further approaches too. Developers will dump files in place, start registering them and install runtimes and keep going until things (appear) to work in order to figure out what to do in the setup (have them jot down some good notes).
Packaging Team: Note that most big companies have whole teams to take care of such setup conversion to MSI - generally referred to as "application packaging". If you are in a big company, maybe try to locate them and see if they can help (or just get them to capture your setup for you - with the expensive tool - for you to clean up - it is no picnic to clean).
Links:
A long answer on features, setup.exe launchers and how to decompose and bundle setups
Over the years our InstallShield code has grown un-manageable and messy. We're about to design an InstallShield 2015 installation from scratch for a new major release, and I was wondering if there's any way to automatically capture a set of system changes to use as a cleaner starting point for developing a new install package. Ideally, I would like to turn on some capturing software, install the oldest release from which we support an upgrade, install the latest service packs, and then apply the manual changes that will get the new release running on the system. Then I would turn off the capturing software, and it would provide an InstallShield project pre-loaded with all the files and registry entries (GAC changes, .NET assemblies, etc) that were created as part of that install. Then I could add steps to delete those that we no longer needed and do some other clean-up and refinements. Does such a thing exist?
Yes, this is called a repackager most often, in the enterprise world where sys admin and packagers prepare applications for deployment on the company machines.
Flexera has one that can create a project for InstallShield, but it is sold together with their AdminStudio solution, which is not cheap.
We (at Caphyon) have a repackager included in Advanced Installer (the architect edition) which also requires you purchase license. And of course the generated project will be compatible only with Advanced Installer, where you can configure your installers as you wish.
I think there is also a free repackager, AppDeploy from Dell, but I never used it, so I don't know how accurate it is and if you can use the results created into InstallShield or if it generates directly an MSI.
If you started looking more careful you will probably find other repackager tools, but you should know that building such a tool is not an easy task so choose carefully. Also probably only the one from AdminStudio will be able to generate a project that can be read by InstallShield.
If you already have the source projects from the older editions I would personally not try using a repackager. Instead I would go for cleaning up all the configurations which you do not understand and re-build them from scratch.
A repackager as good as it can be still has some problems. It can capture incomplete data, for example if you have a custom action that runs different code based on the OS where the installer is running the repackager will capture only its effects on the OS where you run it. On another one might run differently and have another output.
Also if your installer has prerequisites and you run the repackager on a machine where those prerequisites are installed then the repackager will not capture anything related to this, so by accident you can forget to include required prerequisites in the new package.
There is also the things like meta-information which few repackagers can detect. For example files associations which are actually a set of file and registry entries connected together or environment variables, scheduled tasks, etc...
Most repackagers capture all this data and simply show it to you as configuration files and registry entries, instead of creating the correct entities in your projects, i.e. files associations, environment variables or scheduled tasks in their correspondent views.
I have asked this exact question on the Flexara forum, but got no response up to today, so I want to ask it here.
We currently have a InstallScript project which runs fine. The resulting setup can be made unattended/silent fine.
In this setup we have some features and invoke a number of third-party installations (that are a prerequisite for running our software).
However, we have customers that want an MSI file and therefore we resorted to the Basic MSI project type.
The setup is made without too much hassle (I'm fairly new to InstallShield) and I can generate a .exe and .msi from this project.
However the only issue I have left is invoking one of the third-party installers.
That third-party installer (made with NSIS) on its turn invokes another installer which is MSI based.
This results in having error 1500 - the fact that you cannot run a msi type installation while another is running.
I've tried scheduling the CA (that are used to invoke the third-party installers) as the first action and as last, but no success.
Before resorting on the more unorthodox scenarios (like creating a task on Windows Task manager that runs after our installer finishes, or at the next reboot and forcing a reboot - which our customers don't like) or a scenario that we don't bundle the 'faulting' installer (we really like to be able to hand over a single intaller and not multiple), I'd thought I ask your input.
I've tried searching for solutions everywhere on the internet, but either I'm failing due to wrong keywords or I just didn't stumble on the right post yet.
Are there any options left for us to create a single MSI installer that is able to invoke this third-party installer (which invokes a msi installer on its turn)?
Since an EXE bootstrapper is not acceptable, there is only one solution:
store the prerequisite installers in Binary table of your MSI
create some custom actions which extract them from this table and launch them
schedule them in InstallUISequence, for example right before Progress dialog
use searches to detect if the prerequisites are installed or not
condition your custom actions with the search results
Basically, you need to launch them during the installation UI. It won't work if you launch them during InstallExecuteSequence.
I don't think the basic MSI project supports this, but it may be supported by more advanced project types. Other setup authoring tools offer direct support for this.
You can try InstallShield's "Chained .msi Package" feature.
I often get a problem with Windows Installer trying to uninstall a package, but it complains that:
The feature you are trying to use is on a network resource that is unavailable.
Is there a known means of uninstalling such packages when the original MSI is simply not available?
Please note that Microsoft has now released an official tool to resolve these issues, without the problems that previously existed with MSIZAP.
Microsoft Fixit: Fix problems with programs that can't be installed or uninstalled
Take a look at a tool called MSIZap released by Microsoft.
UPDATE:
MsiZap.exe has been deprecated for quite some time. Its use is unsupported on all recent versions of Windows, and it is considered a very unsafe tool to use.
I added a link to a newer Microsoft support tool designed to clean out installations, but this tool also appears deprecated at this point. I have removed the link from the comments section.
Perhaps try the tool linked to in saschabeaumont's answer below.
FYI, this post explains the root problem https://superuser.com/q/293542/245923
You can uninstall it using the product code:
msiexec.exe /x {your-product-code-guid}
You would obtain this code from the MSI itself, or whatever tool you are using to build the MSI.
Note that when you uninstall a product, it uses a cached MSI, since only the original MSI knows how to uninstall itself. When you use the product code, it uses the cached MSI from C:\WINDOWS\Installer.
Update, Stein Åsmul: There is a whole list of cleanup approaches here (recommended).
UPDATE:
This newer support tool can be tried on recent Windows versions if you have defunct MSI packages needing uninstall. This new tool appears to have been deprecated as well.
Perhaps try the tool linked to in saschabeaumont's answer.
It is not normal or standard MSI behavior to ask for the original source media - it indicates a badly designed MSI package. If you experience this with a vendor MSI it is highly recommended that you report the problem to their support team. Here is a more comprehensive explanation of the problem: Why does MSI require the original .msi file to proceed with an uninstall?
In most cases MSI packages can be uninstalled from add/remove programs from the control panel even if you don't have the original installation database for the MSI - the uninstall is run from a cached copy of the original MSI in the system folder %SystemRoot%\Windows\Installer (in some cases this cached MSI could be missing, see section 12 here for potential causes).
Earlier versions of MSI tended to trigger this problem (asking for the original installation media) more often (Office back in the day), and legacy MSI files can still cause uninstall problems that can only be solved using the msizap.exe tool (this tool is deprecated, outdated and no longer supported). This command line tool (msizap.exe) also had a GUI available (MSICUU2.exe), both tools are deprectated (try the link to the new cleanup tool listed above).
Just for the record: If you have access to the original MSI that was actually used to install the product, you can use this to run the uninstall. It must be the exact MSI that was used, and not just a similar one. There is a unique package guid assigned to each MSI file, so Windows will know if it is the right one.
Related answers:
wix - custom action dialogbox on silent uninstall of application
Uninstalling an MSI file from the command line without using msiexec
You didn't do something crazy like go to C:\Windows\Installer\ and delete the files in there did you?
One drawback of MSI files is you need the complete MSI file in order to uninstall or repair the application. Windows loves to store a copy of the MSI. It also renames the MSI file from a common name to a GUID with no table (that I can find) to map original names (example: Office2010.msi) to the new GUID so you have a PC with many GBs of wasted space that you can't delete. A machine that's not even 1 year old can easily hit 8 GB (example: mine).
There is an MSI cleanup utility from Microsoft, Windows Installer Cleanup Utility (deprecated tool, unsupported and unsafe to use - perhaps try this answer instead: Uninstall without an MSI file).
Or CCleaner can usually do this
Control Panel --> Add/Remove programs?
EDIT:
Your post mentions nothing about using add remove programs to uninstall the app, you said the "Windows Installer" (MSIEXEC - see the link below), which is not the same thing.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa367988(VS.85).aspx
Much searching has lead me to find several descriptions of how to create a bootstrapping msi, but these solutions all assume the msi is local or a standard Windows component. Is there a way to make an msi that downloads an installer (which is also an msi) with normal MSI or Wix code rather than by having the bootstrapper execute some non-native program to do so?
My experience with msi's has been it's not possible to run 2 at the same time. (could be wrong though)
What I ended up doing was to instead make an installer exe using Inno Setup (http://www.jrsoftware.org) and ISTool (http://www.istool.org) which downloads and installs the various msi's. With ISTool it's very easy to do.
I know it's not as chic or sexy as Wix, but it worked for me very well.
I would create a custom action that runs in the InstallUISequence. This would download the MSI if necessary (to the source folder), and then try to launch it as a nested installation.
Windows prevents two installs from being in the InstallExecuteSequence at the same time, so if you're looking for a silent install solution with a bootstrapper, you're SOL.
However you can start another install from the UI sequence, which is probably an OK solution as long as you advise your customers that certain other dependencies must be installed first if they're going to deploy via group policy or some other 'silent' method.
If it helps, I'm pretty sure you can also call MSIEXEC with a URL, eg. msiexec.exe /i http://some.domain/blah.msi /passive
I would suggest that you write a native app and have it run the first msi and then run the seccons msi. I wrote a blog on how to do this. Here is a link (http://blog.foldertrack.com/?p=45)