Installing Windows applications/extensions with Amazon CloudFormation

Question

Amazon's Windows Roles and Features template demonstrates how to install features on a server. But can anyone tell me how would I install an application/feature that is not present in this list, such as WebDeploy? I appreciate I could create a custom AMI, but I'm looking to do this entirely at template-level.

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

For your example of WebDeploy, you could add this:

  "C:\\Webdeploy\\WebDeploy_amd64_en-US.msi" : {
    "source" : "http://download.microsoft.com/download/1/B/3/1B3F8377-CFE1-4B40-8402-AE1FC6A0A8C3/WebDeploy_amd64_en-US.msi"
 }

as a element of this section of the template

"WindowsServer": {
  "Type" : "AWS::EC2::Instance",
  "Metadata" : {
    "AWS::CloudFormation::Init" : {
      "config" : {
        "files" : {

You could then add this command:

 "1-installwebdeploy" : {
  "command" : "msiexec.exe /i C:\\Webdeploy\\WebDeploy_amd64_en-US.msi ADDLOCAL=ALL /qn /norestart"
 }

to the list of commands.

Answer 2

There's a slightly easier mechanism if it's just a bog stock msi installation...

                    "packages" : {
                        "msi" : {
                            "urlrewrite" : "http://download.microsoft.com/download/6/7/D/67D80164-7DD0-48AF-86E3-DE7A182D6815/rewrite_2.0_rtw_x64.msi"
                        }
                    },

Means you don't need the "command" section.