Ant automation of InstallAnywhere installers - console mode

Question

My problem is to create an ant target for automating our installer running in console mode.

The installer is created using InstallAnywhere 2008, which UniversalExtractor recognizes as a 7-zip archive. Once I have the archive unpacked, it appears that the task can use an input file to drive the console (at the very least, it appears that emitting a quit shuts everything down correctly, and output is captured).

So it looks to me as though I have all of the pieces I need for proving out this idea except a clean way to perform-self-extraction-then-stop. Searching for a command-line argument to stop the auto execution has not produced a likely candidate, and the only suitable ant task I've found ( http://www.pharmasoft.be/7z/ ) isn't so clearly documented that I have a lot of confidence in it.

The completed completed is expected to work in Windows, Linux, and a small handful of other Unix environments.

What's the best practice to use here?

Answer 1

Since you control the installer creation, can you run the self-extraction step on your machine, package the results before the installer is launched in a ZIP file, etc. and use that instead of the single file executable? Not very elegant but it may work.

Also, I am a bit hesitant to blatantly promote my project :) but since it has been a while since you asked the question and nobody has answered, have you considered an alternative? Our project InstallBuilder allows you to install in unattended mode directly, without having to autoextract the contents. Just invoke the executable with --mode unattended, pass any additional options you may need from the command line or an external file and you are good to go. We have a lot of ex-InstallAnywhere customers :)