Creating a installer using Inno Setup on Linux and Mac OS X

The best way to create installers for Windows is using Inno Setup. But then you face that scary situation: It’s Windows only. To your surprise, Inno works smoothly over Wine. Even Inno Studio works without any quirks.

As I needed it to work in both OS X and Linux and integrate into Ant, I wrote a simple wrapper that runs ISCC, the Inno Compiler, from the available wine prefix. It’s really simple to integrate it in whatever build system you use.

The Dependencies

The first thing you need is Wine, of course. And you need at least version 1.6.

Go to Inno Setup Page and download Quick Start installer. If you want an IDE for editing scripts, you can download Studio too.

It’s important that you install it on standard folder, as script will locate the compiler in %PROGRAMFILES%/Inno Setup 5 directory by default.

If you already installed Inno Studio or Quick Start into a different path, edit the script and point INNO_BIN variable to your ISCC.exe binary. This path is relative to Program Files directory.

The Script

The script is availabe in a Gist. For command line fans, get a raw link here.

Compiling

1. Place iscc script into /usr/bin or any directory included in your PATH.
2. Give exec permissions using chmod +x iscc
3. To invoke the compiler use iscc script_file.iss