Silent installer option for PsychoPy?

Other
1

Each year we deploy PsychoPy over AppV or as a software installer option at our department. Our software administrator has asked if it might be possible to see a “silent” installer option for Windows?

This way, we would be able to push out the latest stable version automatically, without having to manually trigger off the install process per machine.

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2

Yes. It is a NSIS-Installer with the typical NSIS command line parameter (http://nsis.sourceforge.net/Docs/Chapter3.html#installerusage):
/NCRC
/S
/D

Pay attention to the PATH environment variable during a installation: Corrupted win PATH environment variable on installation

3

Thanks Lenz_Lois! I’ll pass this on so we can give it a go!

4

Actually, there was another issue with the installer that I’ve just managed to fix in the very latest release (below). The problem was that the NSIS installer was failing to wait for its uninstall to finish before running the install. This was a problem especially for silent install scripts; in the regular dialog box version the user was in control of the waiting, but in the scripted install it would just carry on.

The result was that it would continue to uninstall some of the new files that it was installing and you ended up with a totally broken installation! Anyway, I have tracked down the problem with the NSIS installer for that and also fixed (I believe) and the path issue that @Lenz_Lois points to, in the new 1.85.1 release:

5

Hi,

Would you mind sharing details of how you have PsychoPy setup via AppV please? I have been doing the same but have found it a little unstable. We are using AppV 4.6 but are looking to move to 5.x which i am hoping will help.

I have also tried building in MSI but that was very unreliable.

Thanks
Gareth

6

Hi Gareth, I spoke with our software management guy and basically he does the following:

  1. Install from standalone installer with a default install and capture the sequence (which I assume covers the items below)
  2. Move icons to the correct location (We have software listed under a specific folder structure for different schools)
  3. Start the software
  4. Go to preferences and turn off check for autoupdates.

It started off working in App-V 4.6, only with a few minor issues - but a recent move to App V 5.1 caused random breakages. As it wasn’t 100%, last year we decided to make PsychoPy available as a Software Center installation option for Staff machines and have it just completely install to the machine. When they kick this off themselves, it doesn’t require admin passwords etc and also does the uninstall process when we release a new fixed version each year. For 2016/17, this has worked really well for us and we hardly had any problems at all compared to running fully over AppV.

For Student PC’s - when we kick off the new build for the year, PsychoPy will be installed directly onto the machine as part of the deployment using the headerless install options that Jon has mentioned. The Student PC’s generally get rebuilt each year, though for any individual machines not picked up, they should be able to download the latest version of PsychoPy each year via Software Center and use the same process as the Staff builds. We communicate every year when we fix to a specific version of PsychoPy and give quick instructions of how to obtain it via Software Center.

Hope this helps.