Creating a Windows Installer Wizard for Website Distribution

The website installation wizard was created using the excellent Inno Setup compiler written by Jordan Russell. In fact I use two Inno Setup add-on programs (both of which I recommend highly) to create and compile the installation wizard:

  1. ISTool written by Bjornar Henden.

  2. My Inno Setup Extensions written by Martijn Laan.

The Inno Setup compiler script website-manager.iss is used to build the setup wizard and can be found in the examples/website/install AsciiDoc distribution directory.

To build the website-manager-setup.exe setup wizard follow these steps:

  1. Change the OutputDir and SourceDir parameters (in the [Setup] section of the website-manager.iss Inno Setup script) to suit your development environment.

  2. You should also have changed the FTP_ROOT definition in the main.aap file.

  3. Run the website-manager.iss Inno Setup script through the Inno Setup compiler to create the website-manager-setup.exe setup wizard executable.

The compiled setup wizard website-manager-setup.exe is around 3.5MB and when run on a target computer will install:

Wizard page 1 screenshot

None of the applications installed by the setup wizard (AsciiDoc, A-A-P Recipe Executive or Python) will interfere with existing installations. No application registry entries are written and no files are installed into the Windows System directories.