Dockerized WiX toolset, focussed on easy setup/usage
This docker image is focussed on ease of use. Instead of modifying the Dockerfile or the necessity of special syntax like "wine candle.exe ...", this image comes with a builtin generator for creating wrapper scripts on the host. This results in a seamless, transparent user experience like "candle product.wxs" Due to a clever combination of a docker mount and a combination of wrapper scripts, it can handle both relative and absolute pathes in parameters.
Before starting your regular work with this image, you must create wrapper scripts for the various WiX tools on your host system. For this, the special command mkhostwrappers is used like this:
Change into a suitable directory in your PATH, then run
docker run --rm felfert/wix mkhostwrappers | sh
Notice the absence of the usual -it parameter. Of course, you need write permissions, so if you want to do create the wrappers in /usr/local/bin, then you would use instead:
docker run --rm felfert/wix mkhostwrappers | sudo sh
Alternatively, use a newly created directory and later set your PATH variable accordingly.
The above command creates a wrapper script (candle) as well as a bunch of symlinks. From now on, you simply can invoke the various WiX tools as if they were native to your Linux system. E.g.:
candle MyProduct.wxs
light -sval MyProduct.wixobj
- For security reasons, only environment variables starting with WIX_ are propagated into the docker container. If you want to make use of the ${env.VARNAME} feature in WiX, you therefore must name your variables accordingly.
- The image is quite big (1 Gb currently). With alpine, this could be much smaller. Unfortunately however, the wine package from alpine fails to install dotnet40 which is an essential prerequisite for WiX. As of 30-12-2019, there is an experimental image (tagged felfert/wix:latest-slim) with a reduced size of 856 Mb.
- The "light" tool must be invoked with disabled msi validation (-sval option), otherwise it fails on wine.
- When propagating WIX_ environment variables into the container, the values are not modified if they contain an absolute path. As a workaround, you must prefix these values with /work yourself.