I have a couple questions about the PA.c Installer. When you run a .paf.exe from the PAM's Options>Install a new App dialog, it skips several pages and begins automatically installing to the correct directory. I'm assuming it does so via a command-line argument. Can somebody tell me what the syntax for that argument is? Also, when was this implemented version-wise, say if I were to run a check on a .paf.exe's PortableApps.comInstallerVersion detail, what would be the minimum version that would support the auto-install function? And finally, although I would guess the answer is no, does the installer support completely silent installation, i.e. no visible window?
I'll probably poke around in the PA.c Installer source and see if I can't answer these myself, but if someone who knows could help me out that would be great.
Visit the Community page
Join our forums
Subscribe to our email newsletter
Subscribe with RSS
Follow us on BlueSky
Follow us on Facebook
Follow us on LinkedIn
Follow us on Mastodon
Follow us on Twitter
Ok, nevermind, I've figured it out.
Quamquam omniam nescio, nec nihil scio.
I know you figured it out already, but I figure I'll explain anyway, just to make sure everything's clear.
It's just a standard NSIS installer, so it'd be however you normally call any NSIS installer if you want a silent install. Therefore it'd have been there since the very first version of the PA.c Installer.
Silent installation is... silent. No windows show up at all. A PortableApps.com Installer's auto-installation mode is not silent, it's just automatic; you still get to see the installation window, but pages which don't need to be shown are skipped.
I am a Christian and a developer and moderator here.
“A soft answer turns away wrath, but a harsh word stirs up anger.” – Proverbs 15:1
Generally that's still referred to as "silent" in common parlance. Inno Setup for example has two switches: /silent and /verysilent. I don't remember the exact details, but I think /silent causes all prompts to be skipped and it just shows the installation progress screen (like how PA.c installers work when called from the menu) and /verysilent shows nothing at all.
I don't know the exact details of how NSIS works (I hate NSIS), but I can't imagine its setup would be much different.
It's actually a bit more complicated than that because the PAF Installer actually has extra checks that will fail if you aren't installing to a specific directory relative to the PortableAppsPlatform.exe, or if PortableAppsPlatform.exe isn't actually the PortableApps Platform, or if PortableAppsPlatform.exe isn't running during installation. If any of these checks fail, it falls back to a fully interactive installation. Fortunately, it wasn't that hard to spoof through those checks with my own NSIS script. The downside is that it does require an exe launcher to do the work, but that's fine for my purposes.
Quamquam omniam nescio, nec nihil scio.