Windows Installation improvements about lanraragi HOT 3 CLOSED

Renaming this to fit a larger overall theme - Installation on Windows.

While there's been pretty good progress in terms of making LRR easier to install(by notably ditching Apache and introducing an installer script for dependencies), we're still a bit lacking on the Windows side.

Docker is a good silver bullet, but it is unsupported on Win7/Win8. (Vagrant works for those!)
The WSL hybrid setup works and is great for development (I use it all the time), much less for regular usage.
Native Windows works, but is a painful slog of installing a bunch of .MSIs.

Alongside fully retesting WSL installs once the next Win10 update drops, a bare-bones Installer for the native Windows version would be a good addition here.

from lanraragi.

Been thinking about this today, current plan is :

• Bundle Redis for Windows, unar/lsar, a LANraragi install and berrybrew in the folder to be installed
• The LRR install will have its javascript dependencies pre-installed.
• Starting up LANraragi through this install will be handled by a basic batch(maybe PowerShell? maybe even a quick WinForms GUI? skys the limit here) script.
• Said script will automatically download/install a portable version of Perl through berrybrew alongside server-side dependencies
• Once this Perl version is installed, subsequent runs of the script will just launch a Redis instance and perl ./script/lanraragi daemon to start a Mojolicious server.

The reason I'm going with the berrybrew method is that Strawberry Perl weighs a healthy 140MBs compressed, and it's unreasonable to bundle it with every version when people can just reuse the one they already downloaded the first time.
If we omit Perl, everything else weighs around 15MBs compressed, which is a huge difference!

The script will be wrapped in a .exe file, so all end-users will have to do to run LRR on Windows is open one(1) executable after installation is complete. Sounds easy enough to me.

from lanraragi.

Only took about 4 months, but I think the current system is good.

Expect a nice Windows-ready .zip for 0.5.2.

from lanraragi.