IzPack: Thoughts on Using Environmental Variables in Silent Installation
IzPack is pretty powerful installation tool. However, silent installation (or the call it Automated Installers) lacks some flexibility. One of the things, which I lack, is a possibility to provide environmental variables in silent installation configuration files (auto-install.xml). Here I will provide some tricks which would help making your installer "eat" silent installation configuration files with environmental variables.
To start with,
Modularized Installers with IzPack
link to dependency plugin
One may want to modularize installer's components and support them separately. It is easy to do with IzPack too!
In this example, we suppose, that installers are built with Maven.
Ok, now we
Backuping Files with BAT
When I need to backup a file in my bat script, I usually do like this:
copy /Y fileToBackup fileToBackup.bak_%date%_%time:~0,2%%time:~3,2%
Which gives a nice timestamp in the filename, for example:
fileToBackup.bak_29-06-2010_1738
Two Ways of Running Executables in Izpack
There are two ways to run executable files in IzPack. The first one is
Installation with IzPack — Launching BAT Files
Intuitively we know -- if we can run a bat file.. we can probably to everything. And yes, you can run bat files from IzPack too!
I will assume, that you read my previous post about simple IzPack + Maven applications. In order to run a bat file, we will have to use a IzPack ProcessPanel.
In your install.xml you need to
Simple Variable Substitution in BAT Files
From set command reference:
>> Environment variable substitution has been enhanced as follows:
>> %PATH:str1=str2%
For example you can change the backslashes to slashes in the URL parameter when you pass it to the Java file:
echo %resources.home:\=/%