I am working on a project and am woundering how I could build an installer for it. Since I wanted it to be very easy to use I need to take a look at other cool installers. What are the coolest you have seen?
I took a look at Woltlab burning boards installer.
The installer should later run on windows, linux and mac so bascially I was thinking of making it a php app itself.
I will host any files on my servers but bandwidth is not a problem.
I am not talking about a desktop installer
I actually prefer installers where I do all the downloading and it just creates the database/inserts settings/checks permissions.
Downloading myself allows me to check hashes if I want to, without having to trust that you did all that correctly in your code. To me there is also something a little creepy about software that downloads itself, which makes me paranoid in web settings.
Drupal has a fairly good installer these days. Theirs walks through a simple wizard that allows you to enter settings and adds the needed database tables. When it is done it tells you what you can tighten up (permissions of the config file and what not) and gives you clear instructions on how to do that.
I'm not sure why a desktop or CLI installer is a requirement but Wordpress, copy paste PHP files and just click the button. It's cross-platform and pretty easy.
If you need to setup server, database etc. with your installer then still I'd still recommend a PHP (or your language installer which requires to run privileged in the start then force client to fix privileges or drop it's own privilege automatically )
So far Wordpress is my favorite. All you need to do it to upload the whole directory to your webserver, access it from the browser and follow some simple steps. I don't think you can go much more than that. Maybe creating the database from the installer as well?