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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.

note

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/4.0.3">
</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.