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
• Mac - creates a Mac application bundle (.app) for launching your application on Mac OS X

Installers

• IzPack - platform independent installer, highly configurable.
• RPM - RedHat Package Manager based installer, works on RedHat, Fedora, CentOS, Mandriva.
• DEB - Debian based package installer, works on Debian, Ubuntu.
• DMG - MacOSX disk image

Installation

The current version of griffon-installer-plugin is 0.5.1
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-deb / create-deb
• prepare-rpm / create-rpm
• prepare-izpack / create-izpack
• prepare-mac / create-mac
• prepare-jsmooth / create-jsmooth
• prepare-windows / create-windows // delegates to jsmooth

All these targets can be called using the standard package command too, for example

griffon package izpack

produces the same result as

griffon prepare-izpack
griffon create-izpack

Notes

Preparing and creating the launchers is cross-platform, e.g. you can 'create-windows' even if you are developing on a Linux or Mac machine (and vice-versa). Building an DMG requires running MacOSX.

Previous versions of the installer plugin provided launchers for windows, linux, mac and a single jar packaging options. All those have now been folded into the standard package command (zip, jar).

History