Are you still using your full InstallShield license for nightly builds? Did you know you could make modifications to the project without a full InstallShield interface and license? In the world of agile and DevOps, are you still relying on one engineer/machine to build your project? If that’s the case, you are missing out on a core piece of InstallShield – Standalone Build (SAB).
What is Standalone Build in InstallShield?
If you are reading this article, you are familiar with the full GUI designer interface that InstallShield comes with. While full IDE interface is very helpful and gets things done in a more intuitive fashion, it helps you out as you begin creating the installation. Once you are done authoring your project, the next stage is “builds” on a regular basis. Why should you open your project in the designer to do a build? That’s where SAB comes handy. SAB is a very simple command line build utility, which will help you build your projects on a machine without a full designer interface.
Things You Can Do with SAB
SAB brings flexibility into your development process. Here’s how.
- Parallel builds. With a single license of SAB, you can build 5 projects in parallel. You can also take advantage of systems that have multiple processors to simultaneously build faster.
- It enables you to easily integrate your build process into your CI system (Jenkins, etc.) and automate your end-to-end flow of development to testing to deployment.
- SAB includes InstallShield’s automation layer. That means you can leverage APIs and have a distributed team make changes to your project.
- SAB saves costs on licenses. Instead of buying full licenses of InstallShield for your nightly builds, you can use SAB and save costs. With a premier license, you get 5 standalone build licenses. With a professional license, you get 1 standalone build license.
As the pressure continues to deliver faster and stay agile, SAB fits right in with your distributed build and development environment. If you’re already using SAB, it would be great to hear how it’s going in the comments below.
Don’t forget these helpful resources:
If you guys have dealt with InstallShield licensing, remember when he says “one engineer/machine” he really means, “One engineer PER machine”!
We are using SAB version in our existing build infrastructure. Now we are moving towards Dockers-Containers. We have deployed Installshield 2019 SAB on docker host machine and trying to build it through container. (We have mounted C drive of docker host on container). Installshield is not getting recognized in containers.
Is there any documents available where we can follow to setup Docker-Container image along with installshield.
Hariprasad, we are actually working on making the SAB available as both a Docker image in Docker hub that you can pull, in addition to instructions on how to install SAB in an existing Windows image. This should be available by end of this week. I’ll post here the link to the article on how to configure SAB in a Docker container.
Here is the link to the article where you can use a Docker image for building InstallShield projects.
https://community.flexera.com/t5/InstallShield-Knowledge-Base/InstallShield-StandAlone-Build-with-Docker/ta-p/127060/jump-to/first-unread-message
We want to use parallel builds but i don’t understand, why we can build only 5 projects in parallel. We need made 144 update packages, we have hardware opportunities, but can’t build fast because of your software restrictions.
A single license of Standalone build can be used to build 5 builds in parallel. If there is a need to build more, please reach out to us to obtain more licenses.
We are getting “ISDEV : fatal error -7159: The product license has expired or has not yet been initialized.” Error when more than one container tries to build installer project.
Build Environment:
1. We are having our build infrastructure running on VM’s
2. Each and every build will spawn a new container on this VM.
3. Build process contains
Source code checkout
Build source
Package binaries
4. Step 3 goes fine when there is only one container running at a time
5. In Step 3 – Package binaries fails with above said error when more than one container (build) is running.
When we had a node locked license, we were able to build multiple projects in parallel on a VM. With floating license this is getting blocked, which is a major drawback.