CMake module for building Windows Installer packages with WiX toolset

• Introduction
  • Requirements
• Usage
  • find_package()
  • wix_add_project()
  • WiX compile and link flags
  • CMake variables in WiX
  • CMake project dependencies in WiX
• Samples
• License
• Version History

A native solution for building Windows Installer packages in CMake is CPack. However it has several drawbacks:

• limited to one installer project (cannot created several installers, for example client.msi and server.msi)
• cannot directly work with wsx files (hard to convert existings installer source code to CMake)

FindWiX comes to rescue in such cases.

• CMake 3.0 or higher
• WiX toolset 3.0 or higher

Add FindWiX to the module search path and call find_package:

list(APPEND CMAKE_MODULE_PATH "${CMAKE_CURRENT_LIST_DIR}/cmake")
find_package(WIX REQUIRED)

FindWiX will search for the installed WiX toolset, expose functions for creating installer packages and define the following variables:

• WIX_FOUND - if false WiX toolset is absent
• WIX_ROOT - path where WiX toolset is installed
• WIX_COMPILE_FLAGS - flags to be used when compiling wxs source files
• WIX_LINK_FLAGS - flags to be used when linking wixobj files

This function creates a new target for WiX project. It compiles one or several wsx files to wixobj files and then links them together into the resulting msi file.

wix_add_project(<name>
    source1 [source2 ...]
    [OUTPUT_NAME <msi_file_name>]
    [EXTENSIONS extension1 [extension2...]]
    [DEPENDS target1 [target2...]])

Where:

• <name> - name of the project target
• source1 [source2 ...] - one or several wsx files
• OUTPUT_NAME - allows to set a name for the resulting msi file, if omitted the name is set to <name>
• EXTENSIONS - add one or more WiX extensions (for example WixUIExtension)
• DEPENDS - add project dependencies for the correct build order

Example:

wix_add_project(my_project 
    main.wxs one_more.wxs 
    OUTPUT_NAME "NameSample" 
    EXTENSIONS WixUIExtension WixUtilExtension
    DEPENDS CppExecutable)

You could do some fine tuning, for example treat warnings as errors:

set(WIX_COMPILE_FLAGS ${WIX_COMPILE_FLAGS} -wx)
set(WIX_LINK_FLAGS ${WIX_LINK_FLAGS} -wx)

FindWiX generates vars.wxi to make CMake variables available in WiX. Here is a fragment of vars.wxi:

<?xml version='1.0' encoding='UTF-8'?>
<Include>
    <?define ARGC='4' ?>
    <?define ARGN='Main.wxs;DEPENDS;CppExecutable' ?>
    <?define ARGV='WithExecutable;Main.wxs;DEPENDS;CppExecutable' ?>
    <?define ARGV0='WithExecutable' ?>
    <?define ARGV1='Main.wxs' ?>
    <?define ARGV2='DEPENDS' ?>
    <?define ARGV3='CppExecutable' ?>
    <?define CMAKE_AR='' ?>
    <?define CMAKE_AUTOMOC_COMPILER_PREDEFINES='ON' ?>
    <?define CMAKE_AUTOMOC_MACRO_NAMES='Q_OBJECT;Q_GADGET;Q_NAMESPACE' ?>
    ...
</Include>

To get access to those variables include vars.wxi into your wxs file:

<?include vars.wxi?> <!--cmake variables and their values-->

Also FindWiX generates depends.wxi with file paths to CMake project dependencies. Here is a fragment of depends.wxi:

<?xml version='1.0' encoding='UTF-8'?>
<Include>
    <?define TARGET_FILE:CppExecutable='C:/my_proj/WithExecutable/Debug/CppExecutable.exe' ?>
    <?define TARGET_PDB_FILE:CppExecutable='C:/my_proj/WithExecutable/Debug/CppExecutable.pdb' ?>
    ...
</Include>

To get access to those variables include depends.wxi into your wxs file:

<?include depends.wxi?> <!--paths to cmake dependencies-->

Take a look at the samples folder to see how to use FindWiX.

Apriorit released FindWiX under the OSI-approved 3-clause BSD license. You can freely use it in your commercial or opensource software.

• Initial public release