I am very new with electron application. I need some help with election installation.
I have an Electron desktop application and a windows service.
I can start and stop my pre installed services by using sudo-prompt package.
I am creating windows installer by using electron-winstaller package.
But I want to bundle my windows service along with my electron application. My requirement is when I install my electron package then it should install my service also, when I uninstall my package then that service should be uninstalled.
Please help me out. Any clue, Any suggestions will be appreciated.
If you think this should be achieved with something else then please do suggest me.
Electron's windows installer packager strikes me a specific case tool that would likely hit limitations in scenarios like this. I would use a general case tool instead such as the Free and Open Source Windows Installer XML Toolset aka WiX. I would also use with that another FOSS application called Industrial Strength Windows Installer XML aka IsWiX.
WiX allows you to describe and build MSI databases using an XML/XSD domain specific language. It supports MSBuild for easy integration with your CI/CD pipeline. IsWiX* is a set of project templates and graphical designers that provide an opinionated project structuring (scaffolding) and greatly speeds up the learning curve and implementation. For example, this installer you describe could be done without writing a single line of XML.
For more information see: https://github.com/iswix-llc/iswix-tutorials
The desktop-application and windows-service tutorials should** show you everything you need to know to author this installer. Basically follow the desktop-application all the way through and then skip to the final portion of the windows-service tutorial where you define the windows service.
I'm the maintainer of IsWiX
** This assumes your service exe is a proper Windows service that interfaces with the windows service control manager. If it's really just a console app that runs as a service you will need to include a program such as srvany.exe. This will require one line of hand crafted XML to extended the service definition in the registry with the proper command line value to be passed to your exe. An example can be found here: Wix installer to replace INSTSRV and SRVANY for user defined service installation
Related
I have a private server that I've been slowly setting up for personal projects, but I've run into a bit of a roadblock. My server is running Arch linux [I like bleeding edge and minimalistic installs in situations like this] and I have Jenkins running on it so that I can have it automatically build projects. I have a project that I've been working on that is currently targeting the Win32/64 platform using MSVC, but I can't seem to find any info anywhere about setting up a job on Jenkins for this situation. I was hoping that I could maybe setup a Docker instance that would be able to provide the MSVC toolchain, especially since Visual Studio Code is available for Linux, and that I could use that as part of my Jenkins setup to generate Win binaries for me to test on my main machine. I mention this because naturally, Visual Studio is not a command line utility, and currently my server is a pure headless setup that only provides cli interaction, so if possible, I would like to avoid directly adding GUI packages to the server, but if it is the only way, I'd be willing to do so. Is there really no way to achieve what I'm going for with this?
Sorry if this lacks important details or is formatted poorly, this is my first time asking a question here as it's very rare for me to not be able to find the info I'm looking for in an already existing question.
After research, this is not currently possible as it stems from a misunderstanding of exactly what docker provides. Docker simply uses the underlying OS to provide everything and does not provide any virtualization of foreign OSs. Without a version of the MSVC toolchain that can run on linux, or possibly the use of WINE, there is not a way to achieve this short of a VM. Since WINE is not perfect, the most reliable solution as it appears to me is the VM, but YMMV. The other advantage to using a VM is that I can keep the server headless.
I can't answer this question completely, but this topic is interesting to me too.
Note: Visual Studio Code is open-source, but that's an Electron-based editor. Visual Studio IDE and MSVC are proprietary Windows-only apps.
The website https://blog.sixeyed.com/how-to-dockerize-windows-applications/ suggests it's possible to dockerize Windows apps, including Visual Studio.
Docker images for Windows apps need to be based on microsoft/nanoserver or microsoft/windowsservercore, or on another image based on one of those.
Once you get that working, I'd use Visual Studio command-line builds, like devenv /build file.sln [optionally /project file.vcxproj ]. (https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/ide/reference/devenv-command-line-switches?view=vs-2017 ).
Note that the VS2017 installer does not function on Wine. I recently filed a bug for this (https://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=45749 followed by https://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=45757 ).
I personally use Appveyor for auto-building MSVC apps. Appveyor is a Windows-based centralized cloud service, not a self-hosted CI system.
In previous versions of .Net, there were some different methods of creating a project that could run as a console app or be installed as a service.
Things like TopShelf or other approaches like: .NET console application as Windows service
This is a nice convenience for development and later deployment. I put together a vNext console app using a similar approach to the accepted answer here: .NET console application as Windows service.
The issue is that vNext runs things in a different way. If you create output, it no longer gives you an exe to install. Instead you get a nuget package and a .cmd file that will tell dnx to host your application. The command file looks like:
dnx --appbase "$(dirname $0)" Microsoft.Framework.ApplicationHost My.vNext.Service $#
So my question is: Is there a way to install this thing as a Windows service given the new console application approach?
I have a windows service that installs itself by executing it in a cmd with the command line --install. This service also knows how uninstall itself by passing the --uninstall param in a cmd.
I need to create a MSI installer that installs this service and start it. I have tried by using Components in Installshield and using Custom Actions but not getting the rights results either way.
I need some help here. Thanks
Please see my answer under Wix installer to replace INSTSRV and SRVANY for user defined service installation
The WiX ServiceInstall and ServiceControl elements are abstractions for the underlying Windows Installer ServiceInstall and ServiceControl tables. InstallShield uses this same feature but instead of authored as XML it's authored in the components view under the advanced settings | services area of the component.
In general it's not a windows installer best practice to call a custom action to register the service. Instead figure out the details being done by the --install command and author them natively into these tables using InstallShield.
Installing, Controlling, and Configuring Windows Services
I'm using WiX to write a MSI installer to start a service that depends on DLLs installed by the MSI. On Vista, the DLLs become added to the global assembly cache in the MSI's InstallFinalize phase, so I can't use the built-in service starting command in WiX. That one tries to start the service before the DLLs are in the GAC, and fails. The solution seems to be to use a custom action instead [1], and run that after InstallFinalize.
The custom action I used was starting the service with sc. Everything works fine when running the installer as an administrator, but running as a regular user doesn't work. The installer will elevate privileges for the actual install phase, but will drop them after finalizing the installation, and starting the service with sc as a non-privileged user will fail. Setting the custom action to be deferred and no-impersonate to get admin privileges won't work either after InstallFinalize [2].
As a final kludge, I tried to add <Condition>Privileged</Condition> to the WiX file to tell the user that the installer needs to be run as Administrator, but I couldn't get that to work either. The Privileged value gets set to 1 during the installation, maybe when the main install sequence is given higher privileges.
So has anyone else ran into the combination of Vista, non-Administrator user, installer needs to start a service and service needs stuff that goes into GAC during installation to run? Is there any kind of working general approach to this?
[1] http://www.mail-archive.com/wix-users#lists.sourceforge.net/msg09162.html
[2] http://www.mail-archive.com/wix-users#lists.sourceforge.net/msg15381.html
This is one of those times when the easiest solution is just to schedule a reboot.
Here are a few possibilities :
If possible, do not install prerequisite assemblies in the GAC. This will allow your service to be started normally (ie between InstallInitialize and InstallFinalize).
Create a bootstrapper (a small app that launches prerequisite MSIs in a certain order). Place the prerequisite assemblies (those that go in the GAC) into their own MSI, and get the bootstrapper to install them before it installs your service.
Create a launcher (an even smaller app that just launches your MSI). Give it a manifest that will make it run elevated. That way, the entire MSI is elevated, not just the part that's between InstallInitialize and InstallFinalize. You should be able to invoke sc succesfully.
I agree with #sascha. Rebooting is not just the easiest but cleanest in this case. All of the other proposed solutions are going to set you up for a much higher failure rate in the future. IMHO, the Windows Installer design w.r.t. the GAC is busted. The reboot is recognition of that.
I have seen this question about deploying to WebSphere using the WAS ant tasks.
Is there a simpler way to do this? In the past I have deployed to Tomcat by dropping a war file into a directory. I was hoping there would be a similar mechanism for WebSphere that doesn't involve calling the IBM libraries or rely on RAD to be installed on your workstation.
Just a hint: if you activate "Log command assistance commands" in System Administration / Console preferences, you will get a logfile in the server log directory that contains the jython scripts for all actions you did on the console. So you can just deploy your stuff per console the first time, and then grab the commands for later and feed them into wsadmin.bat -lang jython "thecommandscomehere" for the next deployment.
There is the concept of WebSphere Rapid Deployment. It's supposed to be the same experience as what you describe for Tomcat.
One way to do it could be using Jython or jacl scripts. See those samples at IBM site.
[EDIT] Especially the wsadminlib.py.zip download near the bottom of the page contains a huge set of examples and helper functions to get you started.
WAS does provide a client jar containing some custom ant tasks. However they seem to be extremely bugy and dont work with remote servers.
IBM ANT TASK Javadoc
Netbeans also has support for was 6 and 6.1 but this again is still quite buggy, however it can be useful for generating some the bindings files etc.