How can you harvest files for Inno Setup

3
votes

I am trying to find a tool similar to heat for WiX that will allow me to harvest file and folder entries for Inno Setup. Is there anything available?

Edit: Heat is used to harvest installation artifacts (files, folders, registry entries, etc) from a machine and generate a WiX source file. I know Wise for Windows Installer had a wild card option that performed a similar function. I have not found anything similar for Inno Setup.

I am trying to include hundreds of files (dozens of folders) of sample projects and data to go with our application installation. These will change between releases and I was hoping to automate this portion of the installation authoring.

1
inno-setup
Hi there, I don't know Heat but from a quick view, basically do you need to collect files from certain directory by some rules and generate setup from them ? If so, I think batch file script might be enough, but it's a good idea to create such tool if there's no one already (it would be open source in Delphi). InnoSetup itself has a few command line parameters for setup compiler where you can define include for certain folders, so this might also include your desired files. - TLama
Can you give more details on what you actually want to acheive and how that tool helps? - Deanna
TLama - I might need to create a script or tool, but I thought I would check with the community first. - Rob Hunter
Deanna - I have edited the post. TLama had correctly guessed my intent. - Rob Hunter
Never heard of a similar tool, but if Heat is well designed, you should be able to add a back end to generate Inno Setup script segments, too. - Lex Li

1 Answers

9
votes

You can include an entire directory tree via wildcards and recursion, eg:

[Files]
Source: somewhere\root\*; DestDir: {app}\Data; Flags: recursesubdirs

(If you want to include empty directories as well, add the createallsubdirs flag too.)

There is no direct equivalent for registry entries, but eg. ISTool can convert a .reg file into the corresponding [Registry] entries.