Description
The Installer plugin provides useful packaging and installation solutions for your Griffon application. The plugin creates two types of artifacts, launchers and installers. Launchers package your application in platform-specific ways, such as an .exe file for Windows and a .app bundle for Mac. Installers install your packaged app onto the user's computer. The current supported options are:
Launchers
- Windows (JSmooth) - creates a .exe for launching your application on Windows
- Linux - creates a shell script for launching your application on Linux
- Mac - creates a Mac application bundle (.app) for launching your application on Mac OS X
- JAR - creates an executable JAR for launching your application on any platform that supports Java
Installers
- IzPack - platform independent installer, highly configurable.
- RPM - RedHat Package Manager based installer, works on RedHat, Fedora, CentOS, Mandriva.
- DMG - MacOSX disk image
Installation
The current version of griffon-installer-plugin is 0.4
To install just issue the following command
griffon install-plugin installer
Usage
Creating a launcher or installer is a two step process. First you prepare the configuration files for that launcher/installer by running the prepare-XXX script. This will copy the standard configuration files into the installer/XXX directory so you can tweak them as needed. This step only needs to be performed once for the application. The second step is to actually create the launcher/installer by running the create-XXX script. This will create the actual launcher or installer in the installer/XXX/dist directory. This step should be performed every time you want to release a new version of your application.
The provided scripts are:
- prepare-jar-launcher
- create-jar-launcher
- prepare-linux-launcher
- create-linux-launcher
- prepare-mac-launcher
- create-mac-launcher
- prepare-windows-launcher (Note: this currently delegates to the prepare-jsmooth-launcher script)
- create-windows-launcher (Note: this currently delegates to the create-jsmooth-launcher script)
- prepare-jsmooth-launcher
- create-jsmooth-launcher
- prepare-all-launchers (Note: this will call all prepare-[jar,linux,mac,windows]-launcher scripts)
- create-all-launchers (Note: this will call all create-[jar,linux,mac,windows]-launcher scripts)
- prepare-izpack-installer
- create-izpack-installer
- prepare-rpm-installer (Note: must be on a Linux platform to run)
- create-rpm-installer (Note: must be on a Linux platform to run)
Notes
Preparing and creating the launchers is cross-platform, e.g. you can 'create-windows-launcher' even if you are developing on a Linux or Mac machine (and vice versa). The only scripts that currently require a specific platform to run are [prepare,create]-rpm-installer, which requires a Linux platform to run.
