Can I create a silent installer with Chocolatey by just using the setup.exe of a program and shimgen?

user_12512570 0
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When attempting to create a silent installer for a program, can I just use that program's setup.exe in the tools folder and just generate a shim for it? If so, where does it then get installed to? For example, I deleted all items in the tools folder and put in the setup.exe for ARM RVDS 4.1. When I did choco pack it generated a shim but now I don't know what to do with it, or if I did it right.

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2 Answers

You don't want to set up a shim for the installer - you want to invoke the installer from chocolateyInstall.ps1 to install the program. A sample of how you would do this in chocolateyInstall.ps1 for a setup exe would be:

$packageInstallArgs = @{
  PackageName = 'package-name'
  FileType = 'exe'
  SilentArgs = '/q /someOtherArguments' # This line is going to be installer specific, and is just a sample here
  File = 'C:\Path\to\installer' # can be a relative path too
  ValidExitCodes = 0, 1638 # array of acceptable return codes for the installer
}

Install-ChocolateyInstallPackage @packageInstallArgs

If your setup.exe is embedded inside the package, you can reference the current package folder directory with the following environment variable: $env:chocolateyPackageFolder. This variable only exists in the context of a Chocolatey package install. See here for more information on Chocolatey environment variables.

Some details about the code above:

  • PackageName: This is the name (id) of the package
  • FileType: Is this an 'exe' or an 'msi'?
  • SilentArgs: Any arguments required to perform a silent installation of the program
  • File: Relative or absolute path to the installer file
  • ValidExitCodes: Any exit codes that should be treated as a successful install. The ones I used in my sample mean success (0) and reboot required (1638). See this page for more information about standard installer exit codes. Search for the error codes that start with ERROR_SUCCESS for the success codes you may need to support.

You would optionally generate shims for programs not automatically placed on the PATH for convenience, in the case a shim is not automatically generated.

Where a program gets installed depends on the default location of the installer, and whether the installer allows you to override it.

Note that while automatically generated shims will be removed on uninstall automatically, shims created with Install-BinFile need to be manually removed on package uninstall using Uninstall-BinFile from chocolateyUninstall.ps1.

Here is some more information about shims:

user_5846760

If you put the executable in the tools folder then Chocolatey will create a shim for it when the package is installed. The shim allows the executable to be available on the path.

What you want to do is run the installer when the package is installed and you do that using the chocolateyInstall.ps1 file. If you run choco new <packagename> you will get a sample chocolateyInstall.ps1 file you can use as a template.

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