htome
19th May 2009 20:28 UTC

Best practices to create installer for app with 32-bit and 64-bit EXEs
Hi there,

Can anyone post a link or some good practices to follow when you need to create an installer for an application that has 32-bit and 64-bit EXEs?

Should we create one installer?

What about naming the EXEs? Should it be myapp.exe and myapp64.exe? or this is completely unecessary as they should be installed under "Program Files (x86)" and/or "Program Files" and have the same name.

Comperio
20th May 2009 05:17 UTC

I have not seen anything specific to this. I don't see any harm in having everything in one installation other than doing so may make the installation size a bit larger.

You can use the functions inside x64.nsh to determine if running on 64-bit to determine which EXEs to install. (Also, since NSIS is 32-bit, it will try to install things in the 32-bit locations unless you use ${DisableX64FSRedirection}--see the examples in x64.nsh)

As for naming the EXEs, nothing really special there. But perhaps from a troubleshooting standpoint, it might make it easy to see the name and know which file is which if the 64-bit version had "64" in the name somewhere.