CruiseControl.NET and NSIS Installer

The last piece of the build that I had to add to CruiseControl.NET for our new project is the installer. We want to be able to drop a full installer to the clients every two weeks, so we have to build the installer first. It seems backwards, but I think it's the way to go. One ends up with a deliverable product at the end of each iteration.

We are using the NSIS installer package, along with the HM NIS editor to create the installer. It's a great open source project that does all of what the big guys do, and again is free and open source.

Interestingly, CruiseControl.NET uses NSIS to create their installers, so I thought there would be tasks to call NSIS from within CruiseControl. However, I could not find any, so again, I went out and wrote some.

Because the command line tool for NSIS (makeNSIS) doesn't output XML, I wrote a wrapper script to call makensis and parse the text output into XML. Then I wrote some xsl to transform that to HTML. [Warning: the xsl is not pretty]. And another warning; the wrapper script is Perl. It's called, unsurprisingly, execNSIS.pl. Its two arguments are the location of makensis.exe and the installer .nsi file. I can hear Jamie already: "What, is it 1998? C'mon!" Those warnings aside, we can now run NSIS in our CruiseControl.NET job and get nice pretty logs. Here are the files; use them as follows

• Add the NSISReport.xsl and NSISSummary.xsl to the webdashboard/xsl directory.
• Add the following lines to the dashboard.config file.

          <buildPlugins>
              <buildReportBuildPlugin>
                  <xslFileNames>
                      <!-- other stuff here -->
                      <xslFile>xsl\NSISSummary.xsl</xslFile>
                  </xslFileNames>
              </buildReportBuildPlugin>
              <buildLogBuildPlugin />
              <!-- other stuff here -->
              <xslReportBuildPlugin description="NSIS Report" actionName="NSISReport" xslFileName="xsl\NSISReport.xsl" />
       
  

• Add lines to your ccnet.config file to call NSIS through the execNSIS.pl Perl script, and remember to merge the log into your build log.

        <!-- NSIS Installer -->
        <exec>
          <executable>C:\program files\perl\bin\perl.exe</executable>
          <baseDirectory>C:\cruisecontrol\Example\trunk\installer</baseDirectory>
          <buildArgs>C:\cruisecontrol\utilities\execNSIS.pl "C:\Program Files\NSIS\makensis.exe" ExampleInstaller.nsi</buildArgs>
          <buildTimeoutSeconds>3000</buildTimeoutSeconds>
        </exec>
      </tasks>
  
      <publishers>
        <merge>
          <files>
            <file>..\installer\ExampleInstaller.xml</file> <!-- NSIS log file -->
          </files>
        </merge>
        <xmllogger logDir="log" />
      </publishers>
       
  

These files are released under an MIT license. Feel free to do what you want with them.