How to create an installer for a Windows 10 HWA bundle?

Question

I've built a Windows 10 Hosted Web App (HWA) using MS Visual Studio 2015. Now, I've investigated if there is a way to create a standalone installer for it - which bundles the generated .appx and related files into a one-click executable. Sadly, so far, I've only succeded to sideload the HWA bundle by using the provided PowerShell script.

In this context, I've looked at the NSIS (Nullsoft Scriptable Install System) to create an Installer for this HWA. So far there seems to be only "preliminary Windows 10 support" according to the latest changelogs (see section Version F.2 3.0 Beta 2).

So my questions are:

1. How can I create a standalone installer without the need to invoke PowerShell installation routines?
2. What does "preliminary Windows 10 support" mean for appxapplications?

Note:

I'm interested in non-Windows-Store based approaches as the app should only be distributed to a group of verified customers by local installation.

EDIT-1:

I'm open to ideas on other (non NSIS-based) installer creation approaches.

Cavorilievo

Answer 1

NSIS does not support HWA apps out of the box. If you know which Windows APIs to call you could probably use the System plugin or create a custom NSIS plugin. I had a quick look on MSDN but I could not find which API you are supposed to call to sideload apps.

The part about preliminary Windows 10 support has nothing to do with Modern apps. It is mostly about general compatibility and version checking.

Gasket

Have you considered providing such a HWA plugin? Could be useful for many other developers as well. – Smoot

@rzo Like I said in my answer, I could not even find the correct API to call so without that information there is not a lot anyone can do... – Gasket

Maybe @kiril-seksenov can support here as he is with MSFT and part of the HWA team (committer at: github.com/MicrosoftEdge/WebAppsDocs/blob/master/en-US/win10/…). – Cavorilievo