Working with development builds of the PortableApps.com Launcher

If you want to test features of the PortableApps.com Launcher, or get development builds in between releases, you’ll need to get it and compile the Generator. Here’s how.

The PortableApps.com Launcher source repository

Development of the PortableApps.com Launcher takes place in a Mercurial repository at SourceForge. The URL is http://portableapps.hg.sourceforge.net/hgweb/portableapps/launcher/. To check out (“clone”) a copy of the repository, you will need Mercurial or TortoiseHg.

To clone the repository with Mercurial,

hg clone http://portableapps.hg.sourceforge.net/hgweb/portableapps/launcher
cd launcher

(To use a different directory name, put the directory name at the end of the hg clone line after a space.)

To clone the repository with TortoiseHg, create a directory, right click on it in Explorer and find the TortoiseHg “Clone...” option. Specify the path to clone as http://portableapps.hg.sourceforge.net/hgweb/portableapps/launcher/.

You can also get a copy of the latest version in this repository without Mercurial in the bz2, gzip or zip formats.

Compiling the PortableApps.com Launcher Generator

The PortableApps.com Launcher Generator is written in NSIS and so you will need NSIS Portable to compile it (it has the necessary plug-ins included).

1. Install the PortableApps.com Launcher. Instead of installing the PortableApps.com Launcher package, you can get a copy of the source repository.
2. Run NSIS Portable and compile Other\Source\GeneratorWizard.nsi from the PortableApps.com Launcher source.
3. Upon success, the PortableApps.com Launcher Generator will be at PortableApps.comLauncherGenerator.exe.

After that you can run the PortableApps.com Launcher Generator as normal. If the PortableApps.com Launcher Generator says that it can’t find NSIS, edit Data\settings.ini to specify the path to makensis.exe.