Automating building installers

[Paul Mulroney]

Hi Bas,

> On 25 Jan 2019, at 6:34 am, Bastiaan Olij <Bastiaan.Olij at instinctsystems.com.au> wrote:
> 
> The thing however that I need to do manually is to build our Omnis library, create our installers with bit rock, sign the installers, upload the installers to our server so it can be embedded in the middle tier we deploy.
> 
> 
> I want to see about automating this process so looking at each of those steps one by one.
> 
> 
> 1) Building an Omnis library out of the Omnis VCS
> This one is solvable with a bit of work, we're using PostgreSQL as a backend for the VCS so my plan here is to write an Omnis library that does the build for me then run up this Omnis library on a headless copy of Omnis Studio 8.
> 
> 
> If someones already gone through that trouble, would love to know :)

The VCS can already do automated builds - we setup scheduled builds using Studio 5 and Linux, and then had a cron job to copy the lib files to the appropriate place and compile our release.


> 2) Creating our installers with bit rock
> I'm not sure about this one, we have a multi platform license for bit rock but I've never attempted to dockerize it. In theory it should be possible, you can run bit rock through a CLI and automate the build process.
> 
> 
> That said, we're thinking about moving away from bit rock, looking into msi on Windows, not sure yet about Mac OS X.
> Suggestion are welcomed :)

We use the Inno Setup installer builder for windows, and Package Maker for Mac.  Inno Setup is pretty easy to use, and I'm sure it's scriptable.

> 3) Signing our installers
> This is pretty much where I'm really stuck in automating this process. The tool to sign a Mac installer is part of Xcode, the tool to sign a Windows installer is part of Visual Studio. Are there any cross platform tools for this? Or something that allows me to do the signing on Linux? I have no idea.

I found a link on Stack Overflow to code signing windows software on linux, using the mono framework - https://stackoverflow.com/questions/18287960/signing-windows-application-on-linux-based-distros


Regards,
Paul.


Before you criticize someone, you should walk a mile in their shoes. That way, when you criticize them, you're a mile away and you have their shoes
— 
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