using NSIS to install and run every time

Question

Im doing a little research into installers, and right now at my company we are having some issues deploying from jenkins using click once. We have a test certificate(these programs are all internal) and for some reason are having some issues with the certifcate being incompatiable with certain msbuilds/.net frameworks. So im looking into alternatives.

But in that i want to keep the same architecture. How it works right now is someone clicks on a button in our task bar, clicks on the application they want, and then click once installs the updates(or installs) without further user input and starts the application. Ive heard a lot of good things about NSIS.

So far ive only seen generic application installers like you expect when you download anything from the internet. Could I do something like i described above using NSIS?

Answer 1

A very basic no interaction installer might look like this:

Name foo
OutFile foo_setup.exe
AutoCloseWindow true
RequestExecutionLevel user
InstallDir "$LocalAppData\Programs\MyApp"

Page InstFiles

Section
SetOutPath "$InstDir"
WriteUninstaller "$InstDir\uninst.exe"
; TODO: Add registry entry for Add/Remove Programs
File "MyApp.exe"
File "Data.xml" ; Support files etc
Exec '"$InstDir\MyApp.exe" -firstrun "c:\some path\file.ext"'
SectionEnd

Section Uninstall
Delete "$InstDir\MyApp.exe"
Delete "$InstDir\Data.xml"
Delete "$InstDir\uninst.exe"
RMDir "$InstDir"
SectionEnd

If you want to install for all users in %ProgramFiles% you can run into issues with Exec because the app can end up running as the wrong user if a non-administrator used some other account in the UAC dialog.