Adam Laycock

Adam Laycock

EdTech Network Manager & Developer

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Using WIX to create an MSI

I’ve had the odd rant on twitter before about companies that aim software at education and then provide no MSI to deploy it. I’m not going to repeat that rant here but suffice to say Scratch 3 has followed Scratch 2’s example of only giving us an exe.

Scratch 3 is RunPointable which is my way of saying the software is all files and just be copied around instead of installed. A lot of software falls into this category and I’ve used a robocopy script in the past to deploy the RunPoints folder. This doesn’t feel great to me. Theres an overhead at each school to setup the script, it doesn’t create shortcuts and its all very manual.

I’ve looked into Wix in the past and got lost in its config but I decided to wade in again and try to get something working out of it. After a fair bit hacking and slashing I was close to something but it was not pretty. I then spoke to a user on EduGeek who had created the Wix Config for Scratch 3 and he was kind enough to share them. This gave me a working example to go from which was all I needed.

After looking at the config I quickly realsied that with a bit of PowerShell I could edit the xml files and create a msi for any folder with an exe in it. So thats what I’ve made.

https://github.com/Ed-ITSolutions/create-msi-installer-from-folder

I’ve been updating the script a lot as I’ve been using it and with the 0.0.1 release it is pretty stable.

With 0.0.1 I used this command to create the MSI for Scratch 3

.\create-msi-installer-from-folder.ps1 `
-Path "C:\Users\adam\AppData\Local\Programs\scratch-desktop" `
-Product "Scratch 3 Desktop" `
-Version "1.2.1" `
-Executable "Scratch Desktop.exe" `
-Manufacturer "MIT" `
-Contact "Ed-IT Solutions" `
-HelpLink "https://www.ed-itsolutions.com" `
-AboutLink "https://scratch.mit.edu/" `
-DownloadLink "https://scratch.mit.edu/download" `
-Desktop

Theres a lot of options there but its quite simple.

  • Path Sets the folder to build the msi from.
  • Product Is the descriptive name of the product which is used for its folder in Program Files and its name in Programs and Features.
  • Version is the version of this product. For Scratch 3 (at the time of wiriting) this is 1.2.1.
  • Executable is the location of the exe within Path.

After this all the options are optional.

  • Manufacturer is the Manufacturer reported to the client.
  • Contact is the support contact reported to the client.
  • HelpLink is the support address reported to the client.
  • AboutLink is the address of the programs website.
  • DownloadLink is the url of the page to download this program.
  • Desktop is a switch for creating a desktop shortcut during install.

There are more options that can befound in the Readme but this is all I need for Scratch 3.

I’ve already used it to successfully deploy:

And there are so many more things that I will not use RunPoints for any more. I plan on creating a site with a library of confirmed working software and the commands used to build them but thats a little way off at the moment.

I have quite a few ideas for the future that I will implement as I need them, for example providing a .reg file to be imported and on complete commands. PRs and suggestions are welcome on the repo and I hope others find it as usefull as we have.