Install wise switches

Rating comments in this legacy AppDeploy message board thread won't reorder them, so that the conversation will remain readable.

Answer this question. Posted by:. Alvinlie Ninja since: 15 years ago. Don't be a Stranger! Sign up! View more:. Software Deployment Questions. Powershell script for enabling location services not running? Setup of script to verify a process, then start if necessary? I'm trying to make my command line works inPowerShell and as to be a silent install. Problem with repackaging a application which has a enforced reboot post-install.

Link Related Links. MSI Switches. Post Related Posts. How to Patch newly deployed Computer. Powershell script to check C: drive has 20GB free space. Once you have a setup. This will perform an unattended installation. This makes it useless for scripting purposes. Once again, there must be no space between the switch and the file name. Oh, one more thing. Many packages have "custom dialogs" which are not supported by setup. For such packages, I suggest asking the vendor to fix their installer.

If that does not work, I suggest doing what you can to deprive them of business. This is basically an InstallShield tree bundled up as a single-file executable. When you run this executable, it extracts a bunch of files to a temporary directory and launches the setup. Thus, to automate the installation of a PFTW package named foo. If you leave it off, the PFTW package will show you a status bar as it extracts the InstallShield tree to the temporary directory.

Read InstallShield's documentation for full details. These MSI files may be shipped alone or with a setup. Basic MSI is another story. Just to make things interesting, any of these mechanisms might be combined with PFTW.

For example, I eventually figured out that the IBM Update Connector requires these flags for unattended installation:. Finally, InstallShield has a KnowledgeBase article which is less helpful than you might expect.

Are we having fun yet? You can usually identify the installers it produces by running "strings" on the executable and grepping for "Wise". And in my experience, they generally do. But there is no way to set options, and the exit status is meaningless. Don't let them confuse you. Inno Setup is an open source competitor in this space. You can usually identify the installers it creates by running "strings" on the executable and grepping for "Inno". The switches for Inno Setup are fully documented in the ISetup.

The GnuWin32 project has put a copy on the Web. It was created by the WinAmp authors to distribute that application, but it is now a general-purpose system which anyone might use. So you can recognize these installers by this behavior. Actually the verification procedure is optional, but most installers have it enabled.

As an alternative, you can run "strings" and grep for "NSIS" These options are case-sensitive, so be sure to type them in upper case. What effect this has, exactly, depends on the person who wrote the script. According to KB article and KB article , Microsoft is moving towards standardized packaging and naming for hotfixes.

But they are not done yet. These installers first extract some stuff to a temporary folder and then run a command from inside that folder. If the application simply has no unattended installation procedure, you can create your own. I prefer to avoid these approaches if at all possible, since they are relatively unreliable and difficult to maintain. There are several tools around which can take a snapshot of a machine's state before and after a manual installation, compute the differences between the states, and bundle them up as an "installer".

The Wise product line provides good support for this, and Microsoft's free tool recently updated provides bad support for it. The problem with this approach is that it fundamentally cannot work reliably.

So the repackaged installer will almost never do exactly the same thing that a fresh installation would, unless the target machine is completely identical to the original machine. In addition, for every new release of an application, you will need to repackage it again. And there are other disadvantages which even Microsoft recognizes. AutoIt is a free tool which can simulate key presses and mouse clicks, following a script customarily named with a.

Most installers have a sufficiently simple and consistent interface that a very short AutoIt script suffices to automate their installation. The AutoIt distribution includes very good documentation. You can copy the AutoIt. First, you must be careful when upgrading to new releases of an application, since the installer's UI may have changed. More worryingly, AutoIt scripts are theoretically unreliable because they do not let you determine when a sub-process has exited.

You can tell when AutoIt itself exits, but that is not the same thing at all. For example, an installer's last window might disappear while the installer was still working. Your master script, waiting only for the AutoIt executable, would then proceed, starting another installation or rebooting the machine. AutoIt provides Run and RunWait primitives, but it does not provide a way to wait for the termination of an application which was invoked by Run.

If it did, this race condition could be avoided. In practice, it does not matter much, because most installers do finish their work before destroying their last window. Just make sure your.