[Feature request] Installer for windows

[terafo]

It's uncomfortable to update on windows with current setup(zip archive).

[starsareintherose]

But you know, the data is very same and won't be moved in the fixed dir. If you need a convincing way to update software, why not consider Linux, especially ArchLinux yay -S trilium-bin to install it and yay -Syu to update all.

[terafo]

@starsareintherose I use both OS for different things and do not intend to completely drop usage of Windows because of mild inconvenience with how this specific software is distributed. There are package managers for Windows too btw, they're pretty good. And I'm not touching Arch(or any other cutting edge Linux distro) with a 10 foot pole after last year shitshow with 5.9 kernel and Nvidia GPUs.

[rrouviere]

I have created a simple AppxManifest.xml to make a .appx
I needed to copy the images folder from the source code and put it in trilium-windows-x64\Images; icons are not looking great because of transparency/opacity and for some reason I can't get the Serbian language (sr) to work.
Only x64 is supported and the MinVersion was picked randomly.
Obviously it needs work and a signing cert, but it works on my machine™.

Here's the gist: https://gist.github.com/U-Bren/d268c0fd196bbb65216e2cda5bc1a067

[rrouviere]

Been using this since my last comment and everything seems functional (including updating from 0.48.6 to 0.48.7).
I've put the files in a repo, just run build/appx/install.ps1 after unziping the release file in build/appx/build-dir.

[rrouviere]

I've done a bit of work on that, here's a few scripts for building an .msix (or appx) and self-signing it. Now you no longer need to shove the uncompressed .zip in a weird place.😀

Also I'll directly post the .msix as releases if anyone doesn't want to bother running the scripts.
https://github.com/U-Bren/trilium-msix/releases/tag/v0.48.8

[eliandoran]

Hi, @zadam .

What's your opinion of this?

Although I'm no longer a Windows user, I did recommend Trilium to quite a few Windows users and their most problematic issues are:

1. Some users don't know how to install it. Windows users are quite accustomed to having installers. Although most users do know how to extract a .zip file, they don't know where to place it or they keep it in peculiar places such as on the desktop.
2. Some users don't know how to update it. Downloading the release from GitHub and extracting the archive on top of the existing installation is not something they would expect.

I'd be willing to assist you in setting up a installer and setting up a GitHub Actions workflow for generating it, provided you are interested in this topic.

Let me know your thoughts.

[zadam]

Hi Elian, I'd be happy to accept such pull request.

Having said that, I'm not sure this would be the only change needed to make Trilium easy to use for non-technical users.

[zerebos]

Elian, I'm more than happy to help out with this if need be; I've had some experience making installers for Electron applications. I still use Windows and as a user myself I'd really like a proper installer. I've psuedo-installed Trilium locally but it's just not quite the same.

Also if it's something that's desired at some point, I can also help out getting signing licenses to be able to sign the installer and final executables.

Having said that, I'm not sure this would be the only change needed to make Trilium easy to use for non-technical users.

There's always room for improvement 😄 but I think having a traditional installer (and potentially a built-in updater) will make it way more accessible to the average user

[eliandoran]

Elian, I'm more than happy to help out with this if need be; I've had some experience making installers for Electron applications. I still use Windows and as a user myself I'd really like a proper installer. I've psuedo-installed Trilium locally but it's just not quite the same.

Also if it's something that's desired at some point, I can also help out getting signing licenses to be able to sign the installer and final executables.

Having said that, I'm not sure this would be the only change needed to make Trilium easy to use for non-technical users.

There's always room for improvement 😄 but I think having a traditional installer (and potentially a built-in updater) will make it way more accessible to the average user

@zadam , thanks for being open to this feature. I'm sure it will be a good addition to make the software more user-friendly.

@rauenzi , really glad to hear that.

I'll start working on building the installer and GitHub Actions infrastructure and I'll push a PR sooner or later (depending on how much time it will take).

Regarding code signing, I've created #4411 to track it. Please have a look at it when you have the time.

[zerebos]

Very curious to see how you'll do it and what methods, it feel like this could have a significant impact on the overall build process #3435

[meichthys]

Trilium has entered maintenance mode. Future enhancements will be addressed in TrilumNext: TriliumNext#126