Windows › NSIS script for faking a single executable

NSIS script for faking a single executable

Mon, 14/04/2008 - 08:07 — IanT

We've occasionally come across situations where we want to pack up our Flash projects as single executable files - not installers! - that can be run on the desktop without needing to be installed. This is like just creating and running a Flash projector.exe - however, our projects generally consist of more than one file, and packing them up as a single projector is impossible. We've also hit this when using the Flash wrapper SWHX, which depends on a lot of external files.

Our solution is to use the install script creator NSIS to create a single silent installer; when run, the installer simply silently unpacks all the files contained within it into a folder in the user's TEMP folder and runs a specified executable.

Here's a sample script that does the job:

; NSIS script to package up all the files in the current
; folder - when the resulting .exe is run,
; all the files are unpacked into a temporary folder
; and a projector file is run.
;
; by Ian Thomas at Awen, 2006
;
; -------------------------------------
; IMPORTANT: Place the name of your resulting app - 
; i.e. the one the user will click on - here:
OutFile "MyApp.exe"
; IMPORTANT: The icon file to use for your output app
Icon "app.ico"
 
SilentInstall silent
SetCompress Off
RequestExecutionLevel user
 
Section
 
    ; Generate a temp file name
	GetTempFileName $0
	; Delete it and replace it with a folder
	Delete $0
	CreateDirectory $0
 
	; Report any problem	
	IFErrors 0 +2
	  Abort "Can't create temp folder! Please contact support."
 
	; Unpack files
	SetOutPath $0
 
	; Pack all the files in the current directory and its subdirectories,
	; excluding anything in SVN
	File /r /x .svn "*.*"
 
	; Run the executable and wait
	ClearErrors
	SetOutPath "$0\"
 
	; IMPORTANT: Place the name of your starting executable (i.e. the file to run
	; when unpacked) here.
	ExecWait "myprojector.exe"
 
	IFErrors 0 +2
  	  Abort "Can't run app! Please contact support."
 
  	; And delete the unpacked files
  	ClearErrors
  	SetOutPath $TEMP        ; Need to do this because we can't delete the working folder
	RMDir /r $0           ; If there's an error we probably don't really care, as it's in a temp folder
 
SectionEnd