mccoyjo
18th March 2003 02:12 UTC

Trying to not be annoying but I could use some advice...
I am a web developer who has been assigned the job of finding a program to use for installing our web projects. Last year I was assigned the job of writing such an installer using InstallShield. It was the downpoint of my career. I don't have much experience with software development and it is hard for me to know which program to pick. NSIS seems highly regarded. I need the following which were not available in IS:

--I need to be able to automatically generate a new installer from script everyday which reflects the current version of our web sites and to pass in flags that will select which projects are available to the user for installation. In other words, I want to be able to build an installer that might install the admin site and the corporate site or maybe just the SDK site, etc. depending on command line arguments

--Ability to fully control and develop dialogs without having to alter DLLs (I suppose this isn't essential but it would be so nice)

Am I looking in the right place? Any help would be greatly appreciated (and might help me keep my job :))

Joost Verburg
18th March 2003 09:50 UTC

You can set defines using the makensis compiller command line(/Ddefinename).

Use

!ifdef definename

!endif

to add a certain part of the script depending on the define.

To add custom pages to an installer, you can use the InstallOptions plugin, which uses INI files. The standard dialogs can be customized using a resource editor and the ChangeUI command (!define MUI_UI for the Modern UI).