Building customer based installation packages with install4j

Question

I am developing an application which has customer specific configuration (2 text and 2 binary files). The use case supposes that customer downloads an installation package (I am going to use install4j) and install it on target platform (Mac or Windows). So all installation packages should be different for different customers. I am considering 2 possible scenarios for implementation:

• Generate new installation package per customer request on server side (cons: I need to have install4j for Linux, which is server platform)
• Have a half-generated installation package and inject customer data somehow to the package by customer request (cons: I am not sure this is quite possible at all)

I never used install4j before and don't know how to implement 1 or 2. Their documentation is far from ideal. They doesn't have examples or consider cases like this, so any suggestion is very appreciated.

Answer 1

You cannot modify an installer after it has been built. The main reason is that it would break code signing. So you would need to generate a new installer for each configuration. If you deploy on Mac OS X and Windows, you need install4j Multi-Platform Edition which also works on Linux.

Alternatively, you could ask the user to provide credentials in the installer, then you could download the appropriate files on demand with "Download file" actions.