In another thread discussing ReleaseIt, my web deployment app, Joe brought up the idea of a cross-platform installer for mojoPortal.  I thought this idea should have it's own thread.

Here is what Joe said to start us off:

"I wonder if you'd be interested in helping with a additional project that I have in mind but don't have time to do myself. I'd like to make a general purpose web installer. VS has some project templates to make msi installers but these are not cross platform so I'd like to make a winforms app that can install mojoPortal (and conceivably other web apps) for both Windows and Linux. Obviously those would require different implementations so the app would detect if tis running on windows or not and branch the logic (maybe we would use one dll for windows and one for linux).

What I'd like to be able to do is embed the release .zip files and be able to just run the exe to install or upgrade. The user picks the target folder (perhaps we suggest one) the app deploys the files, detects if apache or IIS is installed and configures the web site or app if its not already configured.

The user could pick which db platform and the app would deploy the correct data dlls from the embeded zips. Possibly the user can enter a connection string and we test it and write it into user.config if it works. For upgrades it could detect if the user.config file is already there and test the connection string it has.

Its an ambitious idea so I understand if you're not interested or too busy but thought I'd throw the idea out there. I'd be willing to implement the windows logic branch for configuring IIS.

The reason I'm interested in this is I think having an easier way to install and configure mojoPortal both on windows and on linux would make it much more popular. Really most people will use hosting companies and this won't help them but for companies with their own web server or people just evaluating on their own machines it would be fantastic. I could just do the msi thing but I'd really like a cross platform solution."

Joe,

Perhaps you can let me know if this is along the lines of what you were thinking.  Of course, I know you were not planning on such an innovative, space-aged, leading edge, state-of-the-art, Web 3.0-like user interface.  This thing is so advanced it does not even have an off button.

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I was not sure how to share this with you.  I did not want to put anything like this on CodePlex, especially because it distributes your stuff.

The link is to a Windows Forms application that has a couple of the mojoPortal zip files embedded in it.  At the moment, it only includes the zips for the main mono tree and the data layer for MySQL.  Putting everything else in would have made the file large and it takes me a while to upload stuff.  It is probably best that it does not really work anyway but the basic logic is in there.

If the application detects that it is running on Mono it assumes you want to install for Mono using the MySQL database.  Otherwise it assumes that you are installing for MS .NET and using MSSQL.  Both options can be overridden in the drop downs.  The app will tell you if it detects that you are running on Mono or on the real .NET.

The option for the Mono files with the MySQL data layer should work if you want to test it out.  If the right set of zip files was supplied it should work for all the combinations.  It is looking for the files already so it can take a few seconds to timeout if you ask it to install a configuration it does not have the files to support.

The app uses the zip library from http://icsharpcode.net/OpenSource/SharpZipLib/Default.aspx for the decompression.

From here it should not be to difficult to auto-configure the connection sting in Web.config.  After asking for the database username and password the app could verify connectivity (or not) and write the config file to either Web.config or user.config.  A little more logic could handle upgrades, reading the existing configuration first.  You could even move the connection string out of Web.config and into user.config to migrate an existing installation to your current best practice.

Automatically configuring the webservers and updating the installed applications databases gets a little more complicated as the cross-platform stuff diverges a bit.  It would also be nice if the app could be launched console-only as this would make it a lot easier to install on a remote server where you have only command prompt access.

Of course, it would also need to be significantly cleaned up.  The code is one big dump.  All I had this weekend was my Ubuntu laptop.  If you have ever tried to do Windows Forms development entirely on Linux you might actually be impressed by the UI.  :-)

I stole a little time on the weekend to hammer this out but I cannot guarantee how quickly it would move forward from here.

Justin

Joe,

I sent you an email with a zip of the mojoInstall code.  I managed to mangle my Mono setup on my laptop so I cannot even run MonoDevelop right now.  This means that I did not get to test it before I sent it but I do not remember breaking it so I assume the code runs as is.

Finding your email address took me a while.

Right now everything is just mashed into the main form.  I am sure you will want to seperate it out into libraries.  We can use monomerge to create a single executable in the end which I think is best for an installer.  This is what I did for the version I sent to you.

Let me know when you have given me access via Novell Forge and I will try checking out the code.

Justin

Joe,

Everything seems to be working.

I am pretty new to Subversion.  I have started to use MonoDevelop and I compiled it with support for Subversion.  This is the first time I have used the Subversion integration but it seemed to work well.

Through MonoDevelop, I was able to checkout the project via the link you provided and it opened as a solution.  The *.zip files were missing as you flagged before but otherwise everything looked fine.  I am on Linux so a quick "touch mojo-mono.zip" and "touch mojo-mysql.zip" created empty stubs for the missing files.  From there I was able to build the project and launch the GUI with the click of a button.  Magic.

Next, I added a simple comment to the Program.cs file.  I also added a ChangeLog.  I then simply told MonoDevelop to commit my changes and it dutifully uploaded to your Subversion repository.  I went to the command line in another directory and did a checkout as you describe below and the downloaded files reflected the changes I had made in MonoDevelop.

So, it seems that the integration is fantastic and I really do not need to know much about Subversion at all to make it work.  At least, I hope that what I am doing looks ok from your end.

Justin