msitools

Introduction

msitools is a set of programs to inspect and build Windows Installer (.MSI) files. It is based on libmsi, a portable library to read and write .MSI files. libmsi in turn is a port of (and a subset of) Wine's implementation of the Windows Installer.

msitools plans to be a solution for packaging and deployment of cross-compiled Windows applications.

Tools

Provided tools include:

• msiinfo, to inspect MSI files

• msibuild, a low-level tool to create MSI files

• msidiff, compares contents of two MSI files with diff

• msidump, dumps raw MSI tables and stream content

• msiextract, to inspect and extract the files of an MSI file

• wixl, a WiX-like tool, that builds Windows Installer (MSI) packages from an XML document, and tries to share the same syntax as the WiX toolset

• wixl-heat, a tool that builds XML fragments from a list of files and directories.

Building

msitools is built with Meson. You will need:

• a C compiler, pkg-config, Meson >= 1.4 and Ninja

• a Vala compiler (valac)

• bison and perl

• GLib, GObject and GIO >= 2.68

• libgsf, libgcab >= 0.1.10 and libxml2

• gobject-introspection and the GLib GIR files (on Debian/Ubuntu: libgirepository1.0-dev), unless introspection is disabled

• the bats-core submodule, to run the tests

The test suite lives in a git submodule, so clone recursively:

git clone --recursive https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/msitools.git
cd msitools

In an existing checkout, fetch it with:

git submodule update --init --recursive

Configure and build in a separate build directory:

meson setup _build
meson compile -C _build

Run the tests and install with:

meson test -C _build
meson install -C _build

The default build uses GObject introspection and also builds the Vala-based tools (wixl, wixl-heat, msiextract). Pass -Dintrospection=false to meson setup to build only the C tools (msiinfo, msibuild, msidump, msidiff) without the introspection dependencies:

meson setup _build -Dintrospection=false

Without the GLib GIR file, the default build fails while generating Libmsi-1.0.gir with:

Couldn't find include 'GLib-2.0.gir'

Distributions provide the dependencies, for example:

sudo dnf builddep msitools
sudo apt build-dep msitools

Notes

Right now, msitools does not work under Windows. It is planned that it will self-host.

While in a very early stage, it is already usable.

msitools uses libgsf in order to read OLE Structured Storage files (which are the underlying format of .MSI files).

Wixl lacks many features compared to WiX. As always, contributions are welcome!

Reporting issues and sending pull requests is welcome!