Unattended Delphi installation - how?

Some while ago I was looking for a possibility to setup Delphi with certain customization but without having to enter anything or watching the PC during setup to confirm any dialog.

Unfortunately there is no documentation on the possible and required parameters for the setup. And I have to admit that I am not familiar with InstallAware (which is used since Delphi 2007). But there are some posts which got me on the right track. One of them explains how to get started.

I always install Delphi into the default directory, so no need to specify the TARGETDIR, but if you wish, you can. So we get the following:

Setup.exe /s LANGUAGE=English KEY1=XXXX KEY2=XXXXXX KEY3=XXXXXX KEY4=XXXX

Possible values for LANGUAGE are: English, German, French or Japanese (actually those you had to choose from at the very beginning of the setup until now). KEY1-4 are the 4 pieces of your serial that you normally have to enter in the setup.

So this is pretty much the minimum configuration and you can install Delphi... well and C++ Builder and all the third party tools that ship with RAD Studio and are checked by default. And actually some of them run as external setup that requires user interaction.

Unfortunately I could not find a complete list of all variables you can provide. When you run the setup.exe it extracts another setup.exe and if you open that with a text editor you can find out those variables by looking through the script code. Someone who is familiar with creating setup might explain this better. But at least we know some of the variable names now. I will list some of them I used. All variables are provided in form name=value.

Languages that will be installed (which you can change later by using BDSSetLang.exe): DE, EN, FR and JA (possible values: True or False)

You can change the values for USERNAME and USERCOMPANY which are those specified in windows by default.

To specify which personality to install you set PERSON_DW32 and PERSON_CPPB (both True by default).

Delphi also installs with a handful of 3rd party tools and components. You can specify them by setting (all True by default):

INSTALL_AQTIME
INSTALL_CODESITE
INSTALL_FINALBUILDER
INSTALL_RAVE_REPORTS
INSTALL_SVNCLIENT

If you want to install some of them in silent mode set the following to True:

AQTIME_SILENT
CODESITE_SILENT
FINALBUILDER_SILENT
RAVE_SILENT
SVNCLIENT_SILENT

Other options I use (True or False):

INSTALL_FEATURE_DatabaseDesktop
INSTALL_FEATURE_Indy
INSTALL_FEATURE_IntraWeb
INSTALL_FEATURE_SampleDataFiles
INSTALL_FEATURE_SamplePrograms
INSTALL_HELP

There are lots of other variables to specify much more but I did not touch them so far. If you are interested look for INSTALL_FEATURE_.

So finally my setup.bat looks as follows (when I use it at work I also add the company name):

Setup.exe /s LANGUAGE=English EN=TRUE DE=TRUE KEY1=XXXX KEY2=XXXXXX KEY3=XXXXXX
KEY4=XXXX USERNAME="Stefan Glienke" USERCOMPANY="" PERSON_DW32=TRUE PERSON_CPPB=FALSE
INSTALL_AQTIME=FALSE INSTALL_CODESITE=FALSE INSTALL_FINALBUILDER=FALSE
INSTALL_HELP=FALSE INSTALL_RAVE_REPORTS=FALSE INSTALL_SVNCLIENT=FALSE
INSTALL_FEATURE_DatabaseDesktop=FALSE INSTALL_FEATURE_IntraWeb=FALSE
INSTALL_FEATURE_SampleDataFiles=FALSE INSTALL_FEATURE_SamplePrograms=FALSE

This installs Delphi in english with additional german language files without all the 3rd party tools, without VCL for Web, without samples and without help.

Oh, you can write a logfile with /l="C:\Setup.log" but be aware that it may slow down the installation and produces a logfile of approx 40MB!

If you want to install the help use:

Help_Setup.exe /s LANGUAGE=English PERSON_DW32=TRUE PERSON_CPPB=FALSE

This pretty much makes installing Delphi a one click thing. ;)