Basic Setup Builder Alternatives

Inno Setup

Inno Setup is a free installer for Windows programs. First introduced in 1997, Inno Setup today rivals and even surpasses many commercial installers in feature set and stability.

Features:

• Cross-platform
• Customizable
• Software installer

NSIS

NSIS (Nullsoft Scriptable Install System) is a professional open source system to create Windows installers. It is designed to be as small and flexible as possible and is therefore very suitable for internet distribution. Being a users first experience with your product, a stable and reliable installer is an important component of successful software. With NSIS you can create such installers that are capable of doing everything that is needed to setup your software.

Features:

• Portable
• Scriptable
• Software installer

WiX

The Windows Installer XML (WiX) is a toolset that builds Windows installation packages from XML source code. The toolset supports a command line environment that developers may integrate into their build processes to build MSI and MSM setup packages.

Features:

• Command line
• Software installer
• WixEdit
• WixPie IDE

IzPack

IzPack is a one-stop solution for packaging, distributing and deploying applications. It is fully cross-platform and generates a single installer. As such, it is an alternative to native solutions such as platform-specific installers and package managers. IzPack-generated installers only require a Java virtual machine to run. Many companies and projects have been using IzPack over the years.

Debreate

Debreate is a utility to aid in building Debian packages (.deb). The goal behind Debreate is to make developing for Debian based Linux distributions more appealing, with an easy to use interface for packaging applications, artwork, media, themes, etc. More social network pages for Debreate & Jordan Irwin: Google+: https://plus.google.com/+AntumDeluge YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/user/AntumDeluge

Wix#

Wix# answers many MSI authoring challenges. It solves the common MSI/WiX authoring limitations in a very elegant and yet unorthodox way. Wix# follows the steps of other transcompilers like Script#, CoffeeScript or GWT by using source code of a more manageable syntax (C# in this case) to produce the desired source code of a less manageable syntax (WiX).

Makeself

makeself.sh is a small shell script that generates a self-extractable tar.gz archive from a directory. The resulting file appears as a shell script (many of those have a .run suffix), and can be launched as is. The archive will then uncompress itself to a temporary directory and an optional arbitrary command will be executed (for example an installation script). This is pretty similar to archives generated with WinZip Self-Extractor in the Windows world.