Get started with WiX
There are three ways to use WiX v4:
Command-line .NET tool
WiX v4 is available as a .NET tool for your command-line pleasure.
The wix.exe
tool requires the .NET SDK, version 6 or later.
Wix.exe supports commands to perform particular operations. For example, the build
command lets you build MSI packages, bundles, and other package types.
To install the Wix.exe .NET tool:
dotnet tool install --global wix
To verify Wix.exe was successfully installed:
wix --version
See also
MSBuild on the command line and CI/CD build systems
WiX v4 is available as an MSBuild SDK for building from the command line using dotnet build
from the .NET SDK or the .NET Framework-based MSBuild
from Visual Studio. SDK-style projects have smart defaults that make for simple .wixproj project authoring. For example, here's a minimal .wixproj that builds an MSI from the .wxs source files in the project directory:
<Project Sdk="WixToolset.Sdk/4.0.1">
</Project>
See also
Visual Studio
FireGiant has released HeatWave Community Edition to support WiX v4 SDK-style MSBuild projects in Visual Studio. HeatWave supports:
- Conversion of WiX v3 projects and authoring
- Building of WiX v4 SDK-style projects
- Project and item templates
- Property pages to control how the project builds
HeatWave Community Edition is available free of charge.
Using development builds
WiX development builds with all the latest bug fixes are available in a NuGet package feed on GitHub. To add that feed as a package source:
dotnet nuget add source https://nuget.pkg.github.com/wixtoolset/index.json -n wixtoolset -u <username> -p <access-token>
You need to use exact versions for those packages. For example:
<Project Sdk="WixToolset.Sdk/4.0.0-rc.3-build.39">
</Project>
For more detailed instructions, check out this video.