Graphical Installer for NSIS Manual

Using Graphical Installer Wizard

This chapter contains step-by-step tutorials for creating new installers using Graphical Installer Wizard. With this tool whole installer can be created by a few clicks - no manual writing is necessarry.

Graphical Installer Wizard offers two basic features:

Create new installer - use this option to create new skinned installer from scratch (Graphical Installer Powered Installer). Wizard will offer you many options - how your new installer will look, which files it will contain and many other features.
Convert existing NSIS script - this option is suitable in case you have a NSIS script (.nsi file) for your installer and you wish to enhance it (to skin it with Graphical Installer). Wizard will convert your script into Graphical Installer Powered Installer.

Notice:
There is no difference in Graphical Installer Wizard among various IDEs. Graphical Installer Wizard is always the same - the pages, the behaviour, the generated installer, etc. are always the same.

There are small differencies in installation and configuration. But your resulting installer (script file) is never affected.

Graphical Installer Wizard is available as plug-in for several IDEs: Visual & Installer, RAD & Installer, HM NIS Edit and Eclipse / EclipseNSIS. These IDEs are not part of Graphical Installer installation package - you need to download them separately.
We recommend you to use these IDEs for an easy way of creating and editing script files (.nsi and .nsh files). These tools provide a lot of functionality (like syntax highlighting, word completion, ...) which can resolve many errors occurring during development.

It is up to you which IDE you choose:

Visual & Installer is a Visual Studio extension for creating NSIS installers. It integrates NSIS with Microsoft Visual Studio and allows you to create and build NSIS projects right within Visual Studio getting all benefits of this environment.

RAD & Installer is a RAD Studio expert for creating NSIS installers. It integrates NSIS with Embarcadero RAD Studio and allows you to create and build NSIS projects right within RAD Studio getting all benefits of this environment.

HM NIS Edit is a free (open-source) NSIS IDE useful for experts and beginners in the creation of Setup programs with the NSIS.

Eclipse / EclipseNSIS is a plug-in for the Eclipse platform which enables editing, compiling and testing Nullsoft Installer (NSIS) scripts.

Standalone application provides the same functionality without any IDE.

With Graphical Installer Wizard you can generate whole installer or convert your existing NSIS script. This Wizard will generate for you both <project>.nsi and <project>.graphics.nsh files as so as necessary image resources.
Generated files can be immediately opened and compiled - and your new installer is instantly ready for action.

Tip:

Anytime you see an yellow field (usually with some hint like 'Drag file here') in dialog, you can use Drag and Drop to select file into this field to speed up your work.
If correct file is used the field turns green. On wrong file it turns red.