Note: This is a temporary fork of the awesome https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/msitools to add support to use Environment Variables in Wix configuration until this PR is merged: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/msitools/-/merge_requests/42.
msitools is a set of programs to inspect and build Windows Installer
(.MSI) files. It is based on libmsi, a portable library to read and
write .MSI files. libmsi in turn is a port of (and a subset of)
Wine's implementation of the Windows
Installer.
msitools plans to be a solution for packaging and deployment of cross-compiled Windows applications.
Prerequisites: meson, bison.
meson setup builddir
meson compile Note: If you run into this error:
FAILED: libmsi/sql-parser.c libmsi/sql-parser.h
/usr/bin/bison ../libmsi/sql-parser.y -y -Wno-yacc --defines -o libmsi/sql-parser.c
/Library/Developer/CommandLineTools/usr/bin/bison: invalid option -- W
Try `/Library/Developer/CommandLineTools/usr/bin/bison --help' for more information.
[4/56] Generating libmsi-enums.c with a custom command (wrapped by meson to capture output)
ninja: build stopped: subcommand failed.when building in Macos. Ensure you brew install bison and use that instead of the one at usr/bin/bison.
Provided tools include:
-
msiinfo, to inspect MSI files -
msibuild, a low-level tool to create MSI files -
msidiff, compares contents of two MSI files with diff -
msidump, dumps raw MSI tables and stream content -
msiextract, to inspect and extract the files of an MSI file -
wixl, a WiX-like tool, that builds Windows Installer (MSI) packages from an XML document, and tries to share the same syntax as the WiX toolset -
wixl-heat, a tool that builds XML fragments from a list of files and directories.
Right now, msitools does not work under Windows. It is planned that it will self-host.
While in a very early stage, it is already usable.
msitools uses libgsf in order to read OLE Structured Storage files (which are the underlying format of .MSI files).
Wixl lacks many features compared to WiX. As always, contributions are welcome!
Reporting issues and sending pull requests is welcome!