Installer and Updater for a python desktop application

Question

I am building a desktop app with python and packaging it to an exe with Pyinstaller. I would like to ship my application with an installer and also provide automatic and silent updates to the software like Google Chrome, Dropbox or Github for Windows does.

I have found the following software to be able to do this:

• Google Omaha - Does not provide a server
• Github Shimmer - The perfect solution but Paul told me it can't handle non .Net apps yet
• WinSparkle - Updater only.
• NetSparkle - As the name suggests very .Net focused
• NSIS - Installer.
• ClickOnce - .NET only

I am trying to find the easiest solution to my problem.

Florentinaflorentine

What prevents you from packaging WinSparkle into an InnoSetup, NSIS or WiX installer? – Addiel

WinSparkle seems to always ask if the update should be installed. I just want it to update. – Florentinaflorentine

How is this not a shopping question? – Tita

I will try and rephrase the question to be less like a shopping question. @DavidRobinson – Florentinaflorentine

Answer 1

There is a suite of tools from the cloudmatrix guys that addresses that problem.

esky is an auto-update framework for frozen apps that is compatible with the common python "packaging" frameworks. signedimp tries to ensure that apps are not modified after they are signed, and to minimize invasive Windows UAC dialogs. myppy aims to insulate you from base library incompatibility issues on Linux eg installing on distributions with different gcc and libc versions. The whole set can be seen on github here.

The video and slides from this year's PyCon are here: http://lanyrd.com/2012/pycon/spckh/

Qr

Thank you. We are now using esky and contributing to the project aswell :) Plus it also works on mac. – Florentinaflorentine

Answer 2

WiX (Windows Installer XML toolset) is an open source project for an MSI authoring tool.
Part of the project is ClickThrough, a set of add-on tools, including a tool to automatically detect available updates (via an RSS feed), notify users and install the update.
As you can read here:

The Windows Installer Xml (WiX) toolset is composed of a compiler, a linker, a lib tool and a decompiler. It generates MSI and MSM files from XML input. It doesn't include a GUI frontend to create the project files, but there are a couple of projects that plan to fill this gap. Votive, which is part of the WiX project, is a Visual Studio extension. It allows you to create "WiX projects" that act like any other project in a VS solution. WiX was created by Rob Mensching, a Microsoft employee and former member of the MSI team, in his free time and released as open source. It is used by several teams inside Microsoft to create their setups.

See also How to create a simple MSI installer using WIX

Smote

Answer 3

I'm working on a project that you may find useful.

PyUpdater

Enchorial

Answer 4

I recommend Google Omaha. You can get managed servers for pretty cheap now days if the only thing holding you back is the server / overhead cost.

Tintype

By the server is not included I am talking about the software to distribute the files. That as far as I understand has to be built to specification. – Florentinaflorentine