The definitive guide to install4j Building professional installers on the JVM © 2021 ej-technologies GmbH. All rights reserved. Index Introduction ........................................................................................................................................... 4 A Concepts ............................................................................................................................................. 5 A.1 Projects ........................................................................................................................................ 5 A.2 Building projects ....................................................................................................................... 11 A.3 Distributing files ........................................................................................................................ 14 A.4 File sets and components ........................................................................................................ 20 A.5 Screens and actions ................................................................................................................. 24 A.6 Scripts ........................................................................................................................................ 29 A.7 Generated launchers ............................................................................................................... 36 A.8 Form screens ............................................................................................................................. 46 A.9 Layout groups ........................................................................................................................... 51 A.10 Styles ........................................................................................................................................ 55 A.11 Look & feel .............................................................................................................................. 61 A.12 Variables .................................................................................................................................. 63 A.13 Localization ............................................................................................................................. 79 A.14 VM parameters ....................................................................................................................... 84 A.15 JRE bundles .............................................................................................................................. 89 A.16 Services .................................................................................................................................... 97 A.17 Elevation of privileges .......................................................................................................... 102 A.18 Merged projects ................................................................................................................... 108 A.19 Auto-update functionality ................................................................................................... 114 A.20 Version numbers .................................................................................................................. 124 A.21 Media files ............................................................................................................................. 126 A.22 Data files ................................................................................................................................ 134 A.23 Code signing ......................................................................................................................... 138 A.24 Styling of DMGs on macOS ................................................................................................. 144 B Configuring installer beans .......................................................................................................... 148 B.1 Screens & actions step ........................................................................................................... 148 B.2 Custom code ........................................................................................................................... 152 B.3 Configuring applications ........................................................................................................ 154 B.4 Configuring screens ............................................................................................................... 163 B.5 Configuring actions ................................................................................................................ 169 B.6 Configuring groups ................................................................................................................. 180 B.7 Configuring form components ............................................................................................. 183 B.8 Configuring layout groups ..................................................................................................... 189 B.9 Configuring styles ................................................................................................................... 193 C Generated installers ...................................................................................................................... 195 C.1 Installer modes ....................................................................................................................... 195 C.2 Command line options .......................................................................................................... 197 C.3 Response files ......................................................................................................................... 202 C.4 JRE search ................................................................................................................................ 204 C.5 HTTP requests ......................................................................................................................... 206 C.6 Updates ................................................................................................................................... 208 C.7 Error handling ......................................................................................................................... 210 D API ................................................................................................................................................... 212 D.1 Installer API ............................................................................................................................. 212 D.2 Launcher API ........................................................................................................................... 216 D.3 Extensions ............................................................................................................................... 218 E Command line tools ...................................................................................................................... 220 E.1 Command line compiler ........................................................................................................ 220 E.2 Pre-Created JRE Bundles ........................................................................................................ 224 E.3 Gradle plugin ........................................................................................................................... 225 E.4 Maven plugin ........................................................................................................................... 230 E.5 Ant task .................................................................................................................................... 239 Introduction To Install4j What is install4j? install4j is a professional tool for building installers for multiple platforms, especially for applications that run on the Java Virtual Machine. Main features that distinguish install4j are: • Flexible configuration of screens and actions In your installers you can define your own flow of installer screens and installer actions [p. 24] to gather user input and initialize your installation with it. Configurable form screens [p. 46] allow you to create arbitrary forms that work in GUI and console mode [p. 195]. A rich set of configurable actions handles a variety of tasks and is extensible with the API [p. 212]. • Generation of native launchers install4j generates native launchers for console, GUI and service executables [p. 97]. These launchers offer variety of features such as flexible module and classpath configuration, version-specific VM parameters [p. 84], icons, splash screens and much more. At runtime, there is launcher API [p. 216] that interacts with some of these feature and with the variable system of the installer. • Auto-update functionality The requirements for automatic updates [p. 114] are very individual, so install4j offers a template-base mechanism for update-downloaders. Update downloaders are fully configurable installer applications with their own flow of screens and actions, that can handles interactive auto-update, mandatory auto-update at startup and background update. • Bundling of Java Runtime Environments Bundling a Java runtime [p. 89] is made easy with the pre-build JRE bundles and the bundle creation tools in install4j. JRE bundles can also be downloaded on the fly if no JRE installation