Can I decompile an existing installer?: Difference between revisions
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The WIX toolkit contains a program called 'dark' which can be used to decompile an | |||
existing *.msi into an xml file. | |||
Presently, there is no way to convert this xml file into a NSIS script. | |||
Revision as of 17:38, 14 September 2006
Currently NSIS installers cannot be fully decompiled. The installer itself doesn't provide any method to extract files or the script without installation. It is the developer's choice whether the source code and/or the files for the installer are available to the public or not.
There are, however, external tools that allow this. 7-zip (version 4.40beta at the time of this writing) supports decompressing NSIS installers compressed with lzma or bzip, but the source code is still partially compiled and requires extensive modification before the script can be recompiled. A decompression plug-in is also available for TotalCommander.
As a general note to software developers, you should use a plugin like DCryptDll if you need to protect certain files in your installer.
The WIX toolkit contains a program called 'dark' which can be used to decompile an existing *.msi into an xml file. Presently, there is no way to convert this xml file into a NSIS script.
