I’m well versed in building Blender on Windows in various configurations, and currently I run the result directly from the Release folder. This works fine and has served me well over the years. Now, due to changes in local requirements, I am thinking of distributing Blender (with our source code modifications) within the team through automatic installation. We know how to automate that and do this with other applications already. What I don’t know is how to compile an installer from source.
In other words, how would I create something like a blender_installer.exe that users could run themselves and install Blender locally on their machines? Is there something like a make installer command?
The Blender release build uses cpack -G WIX -C Release for generating the installer. You may need to work through various issues yourself to get this working though, this is not something we provide support for.
Thanks for the heads-up, after installing the Wix Toolset creating the Installer Package worked just fine! Also the hints from @LazyDodo were welcome, we can now install our modified version side-by-side with official ones!
So far everything is working great, the only thing I can’t make happen is to create a link with a parameter next to it. I’d like to create a link on the Windows Desktop running the following command: blender-launcher.exe --app-template my_nice_template via the installer.
Can you please give me a hint on where to look for a solution?
Afaik nothing in cmake will take care of that for you, I’ve never done it for the blender installer but since it’s just a wix installer, you can likely do it in the template