Building Windows iHRIS

Overview

This page describes how to build a customized windows installer. The installer is built on a windows machine using the Cygwin linux like environment for windows.

It is highly recommended that you build the installer in the default installation directory which is:

C:\Program Files\ihris-suite

so you should un-install the ihris-suite if you have installed on the computer that wish to build the installer on and remove this directory. All the files paths/directories below are assuming you made this choice.

Installing Cygwin

In order to build a windows installer, you must have a cygwin installed on your computer. To do this, download and run setup.exe. You can find detailed instructions here. You will need to install the following packages:

• wget
• make
• tar
• unzip

You may wish to follow this tutorial for installing cygwin, except you should install the following package instead of the one listed in their Step 9.

Getting the installer files

Open a cygwin shell. You can do this by clicking on the cygwin icon on your desktop, or by going to Start->Programs->Cygwin->Cygwin Bash Shell. A window will appear with a prompt $. At the prompt enter the following commands

cd /cygdrive/c/Program\ Files
bzr checkout lp:offline-ihris/3.1 ihris-suite
cd ihris-suite
make

Assuming all goes well, you should have a windows installer under:

C:\Program Files\ihris-suite\Output\iHRIS-3.1.4.exe

Customizing The Installer

Before you begin customizing the installer, you should see if Using Alternate Sites in Offline iHRIS will meet your needs. You will want to build a custom installer if you have large amounts of data that you want shared among multiple installations, if you have customized your site so that is significantly different from the standard wamp installation, or if you want have a custom home page.

Changing the Home Page

The default home page for the apache web server that will be running on the installed machine is contained in the directory

 C:\Program Files\ihris-suite\home

If you wish to change the home page provided, create the directory

 C:\Program Files\ihris-suite\althome

and make sure that it contains index.html. When you build the installer, it will use this web root.