Getting started with nsis

Remarks#

NSIS (Nullsoft Scriptable Install System) is a professional open source system to create Windows installers. It is designed to be as small and flexible as possible and is therefore very suitable for internet distribution.

Being a user’s first experience with your product, a stable and reliable installer is an important component of succesful software. With NSIS you can create such installers that are capable of doing everything that is needed to setup your software.

NSIS is script-based and allows you to create the logic to handle even the most complex installation tasks. Many plug-ins and scripts are already available: you can create web installers, communicate with Windows and other software components, install or update shared components and more.

—> Taken from: https://sourceforge.net/projects/nsis/

Versions#

Version	Notes	Release Date
2.00.0		2004-02-07
2.46.0	Probably the most common version seen in the wild.	2009-12-06
2.51.0	Final 2.x release, contains important security fixes.	2016-04-01
3.00.0	First version with official Unicode support.	2016-07-24

Installation or Setup

NSIS installer can be downloaded from https://nsis.sourceforge.net/Download. An exe of 1.6 MB will be downloaded. You can install it using the wizard. While installing there are options to install

1. Full: Installs all the components
2. Lite: Basic and only essential components from the UI
3. Minimal: The NSIS core files only.
4. Custom: It's up to us to install whichever components that we need.

Hello World!

Code, to be saved in „helloworld.nsi“:

Name "Hello World"
OutFile "helloworld.exe"
Section "Hello World"
MessageBox MB_OK "Hello World!"
SectionEnd

Compile it with:

<Path to NSIS>\makensis.exe <Path to script>\helloworld.nsi