Deployment (3), Wise Installer

This article series mainly discuss app deployment.  It is a kind of skill, but I cannot find the corresponding category from the category list.  The most closed ones are, I thought, DevOps or Project Management.  For the later one, deployment is a part of project management, but the category is too broad, and seems too non technically, or not skill oriented. So, we choose the category of DevOps, we can view the deployment is a part of Continue Integration or Continue Deployment.

Introduction

Recently, we had a project to deploy an app by using InstallShield, I remember before DevOps making Continue Integration and Deployment, we used to use some installation tool to make the deployment quasi-automatic or semi-automatic.

Wise Installer

Wise Installation System is a tool for creating Windows setup programs, by installing multiple applications at once, either EXEs or MSIs. based on WiseScript. It is a legacy product, End-of-Life at 2013. 

A similar process could be achieved by Advanced Installer.

This article is just recording the Wise Installer Setup and installation process by my previous notes. The content of this article:

  • Introduction
  • Installation Files Preparation
  • Setup Process
  • Make Setup
  • Run Setup --- Installation

Installing Files Preparation

Using Wise Installer, one has to deploy your app into a file folder in Server.  For a different project, under the file folder you can have different folder for each separate apps:

  • Files
    • Web --- Visual Studio: run publish
    • Service --- Web API, the same
    • Batch File --- built .exe
    • Library --- built .dll
  • Archive
  • Wise Installer
  • Wise Installer Archive

Note:

There is another installer called AutoX, in which one can run the setup process against TFS directly, and does not need to build or deploy each application oneself, closer to DevOps. Probably too easy to use, I did not have screenshots saved.

Setup Process

Open Wise Installer:

We can edit it through each panel:

Another one:

Switch to Script Editor:

in details:

you can edit it by right click:

Open a GUI editor:

Make Setup 

Click Compile or Run at right lower corner:

make the setup file:

auto-saved the setup file in a folder as you defined in the installer:

Run Setup --- Installation

Copy and paste the created Wise Installer into the server to be installed, right Click => administrator => run:

run setup:

installing:

repeat each installation process in each server, such as

  • Web Server
  • Web Service Server --- Web API
  • Batch Server
  • Library Server

Reference


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