Looking for a way out of the corner my company has painted itself into.
Windows Services are currently installed by manually copying files around and running various batch files to install / uninstall. Locations differ by site and depending on whether the installed code is for production or test usage. So my debug build might need to install into
C:\someFolder\Site1\Test
while the Release build of the same code would install into
C:\someFolder\Site1
Currently only 2 sites but probably expanding soon.
I'm trying to put together a WiX install project (VS2010, WiX 3.5) to handle the installation. I'm not able to change the install folder definition (much as I would like to!) and I'm running into problems trying to understand how I might approach the problem. Being a newbie to WiX doesn't help.
For the question about release/debug versions:
At the place in your code where you are defining your target directory, you can conditionally set it based on the build version. For example, Debug is an available variable that can be used like:
<!-- inside of somefolder/site target definition, conditionally append test dir -->
<?ifdef var.Debug ?>
<Directory Id="TestId" Name="test" />
<?endif?>
You can also add other build dependent variables in visual studio for each type of release. This would be a unique build for each target situation model. This could easily get confusing to users about which version they should use.
The other model - one build with flexible target locations:
For the different site directories: Depends on how those sites are created.
If they exist previous to your install, just use wix's directorysearch to set a property used to build the target directory.
If instead the target directory is decided at install time, and its based on user's decision, then you'll need to prompt for the name or type (site). This will be similar to the typical situation of asking for a custom install directory. You can modify one of the sample custom wix dialogs included in the wix source that do this and add that dialog to your project's next/back flow.
Related
I have an application with a bootstrapper that installs multiple components below it. The code below uses ninject to have a loosely coupled database layer.
With regards to the bundle/bootstrapper, I would like to move the database layer out into a separate msi in order to support optional data layer choices on install (e.g.: radio buttons to install SQLite/SQLExpress/MySQL etc..).
I am struggling to figure out how to get the install directory working though, as the database components needs to install into the root/install directory of the main application. (rather than using the gac etc).
How can I do this? I have tried the steps mentioned here: How to use properties to set the installation path? but to no avail. I must have something wrong.. but given the code is spread over 5(ish) files, it seems a little large to load here!
Any pointers to get started trying to implement this, or should I go ahead and upload the code?
The method you refer to should work. Note however that the name of the property given in
<MsiProperty Name="INSTALLLOCATION"
should match the name used in wxs file of the corresponding MSI package. Typically if the MSI was created based on WixUI_InstallDir template the name would be APPLICATIONFOLDER and in the default template without the UI it is INSTALLFOLDER.
I am trying to make changes to the WixStandardBootstrapperApplication.cpp and generate a dll as per the suggestion from this link. I have downloaded the wix310-debug source and am modifying the file present under wix310-debug\src\ext\BalExtension\wixstdba\ location. There is a wixstdba.vcxproj file under this location which I am trying to open using Visual Studio 2012. Whenever I try to do that I get the error:
Unable to read the project file "wixstdba.vcxproj". The imported project "C:\tools\WixBuild.props" was not found.
I am not sure what should I do to correct this. Also, based on the referenced link, I think I am updating the correct file but let me know if that is not the case. Any help in this would be great. Thanks in advance.
In your vcxproj there's a line like this:
<Import Project="$([MSBuild]::GetDirectoryNameOfFileAbove($(MSBuildProjectDirectory), wix.proj))\tools\WixBuild.targets" />
The debug source isn't really the source of wix. It includes all the wix source files but it is not really buildable. This zip has all the built pdbs and is used to debug only.
You want to download the wix source from wixtoolset's github so that you can build wixstdba. But, this is for version 3.10.3 currently and may have some version specific changes but I don't see anything that would be an issue using the dll built here against wix 3.10.2 since the engine and bootstrapper application interfaces should have remained the same.
But, you should be able to build all this with only the WixStdBA project. You will have to copy over the wixstdba folder. Edit the vcxproj and remove the import line mentioned above (it should be near the bottom).
Now, add this project to your a new solution or your installer solution in visual studio. We need to add addition include and library directories. All these include directories will be in your wix install location (default C:\Program Files (x86)\WiX Toolset v3.10) In Properties -> C/C++ -> General -> additional include directories add your wix SDK include path. If you are using visual studio 2013 you can use the full path or you can use "$(WIX)\SDK\vs2013\inc". $(WIX) should reference the WIX environment variable which points to the install directory which is added when installing wix. This should be the better option if you will be building on a build system with wix installed since the location may be different across machines.
Now for addition library directories, we go to the Properties -> Linker -> General -> Additional Library Directoryes and add in the correct lib path. If you are using visual studio 2013 you want to put in $(WIX)\SDK\vs2013\lib\x86. Finally we need to reference the libs that are needed to build the bootstrapper dll. Under Linker -> Input -> Additional Dependencies, add in "dutil.lib;balutil.lib". My additional dependencies has a lot more stuff and I don't remember if it was by default there. Here's my Additional Dependencies in full anyways
dutil.lib;balutil.lib;advapi32.lib;comctl32.lib;comdlg32.lib;gdi32.lib;gdiplus.lib;kernel32.lib;msimg32.lib;odbc32.lib;odbccp32.lib;ole32.lib;oleaut32.lib;shell32.lib;shlwapi.lib;user32.lib;uuid.lib;wininet.lib;winspool.lib;version.lib;%(AdditionalDependencies)
With this you should be able to build the wixstdba project and get a dll built. Without editing any code this should be the exact same as the wix included wixstdba.dll.
You could try referencing this dll instead of the wix included one (have to define your own BootstrapperApplication instead of using the BootstrapperApplicationRef to one of the wix ones) or just drop in this dll into your wix location's bin.
I'm converting our current monolithic installer to use a WiX 3.7 Bundle/chain. We have several components that are now building into their own separately-maintainable MSI installers. My next task is to add all of these to a bootloader/bootchainer, but I've hit a snag.
A requirement for our individual installers is that they contain the version in the filename (i.e. MyApplication-5.4.22.msi). I don't see a tool like Heat for collecting MSI packages together, and I don't see a way to add an MsiPackage element with a wildcard to account for varying package names.
As a last resort, I can wrap the bundler inside of another MSBuild script that will 'autocomplete' the filenames and pass the paths in as variables to the bundler. I'm hoping someone can recommend a solution that works directly in the wxs or wixproj setting.
If the msi files are built with WiX Setup projects, the WiX Bootstrapper project can reference them, thereby creating useful WiX variables that are defined as the paths to the msi files.
See my answer here, as well as the list of variables here.
If that's not the case then you can write some MSBuild targets that run before the Build target to figure out the actual file paths. If the available standard and community MSBuild tasks aren't sufficient, you can write your own tasks, either by creating an assembly or using inline code. (And, of course, there is always the Exec task to shell out to a command-line program like cmd.exe, after which you can parse its output to extract the msi paths.)
I would like to create a setup project based on WiX which does the following (as well as creating the installation package):
callable from msbuild running on a CI build server (Hudson)
take a version number from some asset in either the setup project or the main assembly
take the current build number from the CI system
create a full product version number [version].[build] such as 1.3.432
store this value in an asset (e.g. the main assembly) is such a way that it can be read out at run time and displayed on the splash window
I have tried a number of approaches and googled a lot but have not found a workable solution. Can anyone help?
The WiX toolset does this by creating a version.cs, a version.h and a version.wxi during the MSBuild then including those files in all the projects. That way our executable can print out their version when you run something like candle.exe -? and all of the bundles and .msi packages have their versions set correctly.
You can see how we do this in tools\WixBuild.Version.targets (here). It would straight forward to override the properties in WixBuild.Version.targets with properties passed via the command-line to MSBuild via Hudson if you wanted.
I'm using latest votive (Wix v3.5) and created a simple Wix VS 2010 setup project. I added my website reference and set the Harvest option as true.
Now since my INSTALLDIR points to a folder under IISROOT, I get this light.exe error:
[filepath]: error LGHT0231: The component
'cmp93982C4086FF8C75F07339DD7CEA8152' has a key file with path
'TARGETDIR\webdir...[filename].xml'. Since this path is not rooted
in one of the standard directories (like ProgramFilesFolder), this
component does not fit the criteria for having an automatically
generated guid. (This error may also occur if a path contains a
likely standard directory such as nesting a directory with name
"Common Files" under ProgramFilesFolder.)
While I understand the reason behind this error, I don't necessarily agree to its rational (maybe I don't understand the innate workings of Wix MSI generation).
How can I resolve this error?
To provide some context:
I'm trying to set this up in conjunction with Team Build. I can use the legacy format and run Heat/Harvest task against a folder to bypass this issue but do not want to go the legacy route.
I have not played enough with the new workflow based build definition, so not sure how I can incorporate this custom task.
I need to run harvest every time the Setup project is built because I do not want to keep track of hundreds of files manually.
The problem is because the component is rooted in TARGETDIR, which WiX cannot use for automatically generating a guid. You can add Directory/#ComponentGuidGenerationSeed to a directory above this component to avoid the problem. By adding this attribute, you must now take responsibility for ensuring the component doesn't get installed to two different directories across upgrades.
In Windows Installer, components need to have a guid that doesn't change between patches, minor upgrades, and major upgrades. As a convenience, WiX can generate a version 5 UUID for you using the component's directory hierarchy as the seed. But, TARGETDIR is ineligible for this.
I believe the reason is that TARGETDIR changes across installations (it's set to the drive that has the most free space). One of the component rules is "each component must be stored in a single folder". If TARGETDIR changed between major upgrades, then you could end up trying to install the same component to a second folder.