🚀 NSISBI for Electron Builder

The Big Boy Installer Solution 💪 For when your Electron App exceeds the puny 2GB maximum size of normal windows installers - Pushes the theoretical max to 8EB!

At it's core, this is pretty much a mirror of sourceforge project NSISBI a build tool for creating windows installers >2Gib. This repo also provides supplemental nicities for sane compatability with Electron-Builder's windows-flavored build pipeline.

Common Usage ⚡️

In your Electron-Builder setup, simply configure customNsisBinary to enable creation of windows installers larger than 2GiB:

{
  // Your config
  // ...
  "build": {
    "nsis": {
      "customNsisBinary": {
        "url":"https://github.com/SoundSafari/NSISBI-ElectronBuilder/releases/download/1.0.0/nsisbi-electronbuilder-3.10.3.7z",
        "checksum":"WRmZUsACjIc2s7bvsFGFRofK31hfS7riPlcfI1V9uFB2Q8s7tidgI/9U16+X0I9X2ZhNxi8N7Z3gKvm6ojvLvg=="
      }
    }
  }
}

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🍎 Cross-Platform Builds 🐧

🚨 You must have wine installed on your machine in order to build for windows on a MacOS/Linux environment.

Install Wine

• 🍎 MacOS [Brew] brew install --cask --no-quarantine wine-stable
• 🐧 Linux [Debian] sudo apt install wine wine32 libwine fonts-wine
• 🐧 Linux [Arch] sudo pacman -S wine

Why Wine?

The decade old version of NSIS that ships with electron builder by default has native compiled MacOS/Linux NSIS binaries.

NSISBI and pretty much all recent releases of NSIS do not ship cross-platform binaries. It is much easier and reliable to persue cross-platform builds via wine.

How Wine?

We put shell-scripts in the binary-target paths Electron-Builder uses for NSIS on Mac/Linux. The scripts invoke wine to execute our NSISBI flavored ./Bin/makensis.exe and wine-ify all the local file paths transmitted to the process.

This uses the wine installed on the machine you're building with which wine and not any static-versions of wine packaged with electron-builder.

🚧 Warning for >4GB Installers

If your final installer.exe size exceeds 4GB, NSISBI generates a two-file installer:

• 1️⃣ < Small installer.exe file >
• 2️⃣ < Large data-file with your app data >

Both files will appear in your normal electron-builder output directory. To distribute your two file installer simply .zip both files together and distribute the .zip file.

The two files must remain in the same directory in order for the installer to work.

Why not one installer file?

While NSISBI is capable of producing windows .exe installers all the way up to 8EB, it must produce a two-file installer after 4Gib is exceeded. The NSISBI author goes into more detail on this topic if you're interested.

📜 Honorable Mentions

• NSISBI Author @JasonFriday13 [SourceForge]
• Electron-Builder [GitHub]

🤖 Creating Releases

Electron-Builder has a pretty interesting escape hatch for using custom NSIS binaries in your build, namely you must provide :

1. A remote URL for your custom NSIS binary inside a 7zip archive.
2. A base64 encoded sha512 checksum of the the aforementioned .7z archive

Release Generation CMDs

7z a -r nsisbi-electronbuilder-VERSION.7z *
cat  ./nsisbi-electronbuilder-VERSION.7z | openssl dgst -sha512 -binary | base64
# NOTE: To use with electron-builder:
#     -> You must host .7z at a remote URL
#     -> You must include sha512 checksum in your electron-builder config

❤️ Contributing

Is the NSISBI version out of date? Found a Bug? Want more features? Open an issue or PR!

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Sheparded with ❤️ by the Electron-Builder community