Generating the MSI Installer

Dynamo's installer (as of August, 8th, 2014) is a self-contained executable. We have recently added another installer project to the Dynamo repository which allows you to generate an .msi to install Dynamo. The msi installer is created using the WIX Toolset. You must install this in order to build the installer project. The .msi installer project is a separate solution so that all developers need not have the WIX toolset installed if they are not interested in generating an installer. But, the .wxproject representing the installer is a proper Visual Studio project and can be edited as such by opening the src\Install.sln solution and editing the DynamoInstall project.

The project will only harvest files from the main "Release" directory. So the build order for the project should be as follows

1. Dynamo.All.2012.sln - Master (to get assets for Revit 2014)
2. Dynamo.All.2012.sln - Revit2015 (to get assets for Revit 2015)
3. Install.sln

In order to build the Install project you will need to define the following environment variables:

DYNAMO_BASE - This is the path to the Dynamo repository on your machine.
DYNAMO_HARVEST_PATH - This is a folder where the installation files will be staged prior to building the installer. Wix's Heat tool is used to "harvest" the installation files from this directory. DYNAMO_MIGRATION_NODES_PATH - This is a path to the directory which contains the common custom nodes used for migrations.
DYNAMO_SAMPLES_PATH - This is a path to the samples to be included with the installer.
DYNAMO_REVIT_SIGN_TOOLS - This is the path to a folder which contains the signing tools used to generate a signature file for verifying Dynamo as a Revit internal addin. Only Autodesk employees will have access to these tools, so .msi files generated on third-party development systems will not be able to generate the signature file required to verify Dynamo as a Revit internal AddIn.

This installer behaves differently than the .exe installer. The .exe installer installs Dynamo into C:\Program Files\Dynamo (or the user's standard program files folder). The .msi installer installs Dynamo within the Revit installation: C:\Program Files\Autodesk\Revit\AddIns\Dynamo.

The installer has two properties that can be called from the command line: REVIT_FLAVOR - This parameter specifies the version of Revit under which you would like to install Dynamo. INSTALL_FOR_REVIT_2014 - This parameter specifies whether an AddIn file should be included in the install to register Dynamo as an addin for Revit 2014. INSTALL_FOR_REVIT_2015 - This parameter specifies whether an AddIn file should be included in the install to register Dynamo as an addin for Revit 2015.