Windows Installer Compilation

This page serves as a reference for the process of building an installable version of the application.

Launch4j

Launch4j is used in this project to wrap the .jar (JAR) file into an executable .exe file. Launch4j allows the developer to specify many attributes of the generated executable. The specifications of the generation of this "wrapper" executable must be within the build.gradle file in the createExe() task. This is achieved using the gradle plugin launch4j-gradle.

In short, you can specify:

• The main class to be loaded using the full package name (e.g. edu.rpi.legup.Legup),
• The output directory of the operation (e.g. ../native/windows to set the directory LegupSource/native/windows)
• The output file location within the output directory (e.g. bin/Legup.exe to output to LegupSource/native/windows/bin/Legup.exe)
• The bundled JRE path (e.g. jre for the JRE path if you have the java runtime in the folder jre in the same directory as the executable)
• The JRE specifications (e.g. must be over Java 1.8, can be 64 or 32 bit, etc.)

There are other settings which can be set within the build.gradle file for the createExe() task which I have not specified, see the launch4j and launch4j-gradle documentation.

This process generates what is essentially a JAR file packaged inside of an executable. This is not an installer; see below for information about the installer which installs this file and a given JRE.

InnoSetup