How to build Windows Installer (MSI) packages for SaltStack

salt-msi-instructions.md

Build environment (in order):

• Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 Standard w/ SP1
• Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 (all features)
• Microsoft Windows SDK for Windows 7 and .NET Framework 4 (all features)
• Python 2.7.11 (all features, skip byte compilation of .py files)
• Run WindowsSdkVer.exe -version:v7.1 as an administrator in order to register the SDK properly with Visual Studio 2008.
• Run pip install -U setuptools as an administrator in order to update the bundled version of setuptools.
• Patch distutils per http://bugs.python.org/issue15797.

Obtaining sources:

• pip install --no-binary :all: -d . salt
• download some manually (e.g., pypiwin32, pycrypto, salt)
• grab the salt source release from GitHub in ZIP format (the tarball includes symlinks that 7-Zip can't handle)
• m2crypto isn't needed as of the salt 2015.8 branch

Patching sources:

• some libraries with dotted-quad version numbers need to be changed to dotted-triple version numbers, otherwise bdist_msi fails (e.g., backports.ssl_match_hostname, certifi, pypiwin32, singledispatch)
• pypiwin32-219 is missing several demo and test files, references to which must be removed from setup.py

Building Windows installers:

• build everything from the Windows SDK 7.1 Command Prompt
• make sure to run setenv /release in the Windows SDK 7.1 Command Prompt to disable debugging flags
• python setup.py bdist_msi && copy dist\*.msi ..\..\packages\
• distutils should find the C++ compiler via the registry

Gotchas:

• the compiler included in Microsoft Visual C++ Compiler for Python 2.7 is not compatible with distutils
• the compiler included in version 7.0 of the Microsoft Windows SDK is not compatible with distutils
• the compiler included in version 7.1 of the Microsoft Windows SDK is not compatible with Python, nor is it compatible with distutils
• SaltStack's build scripts refer to packages not downloaded by pip
• salt's setup.py wants all requisites installed before running its build process, while the other packages seem to be able to be built in any order
• pip install -U setuptools
• http://sourceforge.net/p/pywin32/bugs/648/
• salt gets the wrong version number (2015.8.0 instead of 2015.8.3)
• salt's setup.py does not create ".exe" files in the Python scripts folder
• The root directory is hard-coded in salt\syspaths.py.

Directory Structure that must be created by hand:

	 c:\salt\
		 conf\
			 minion
			 pki\
		 var\
			 cache\
				 salt\
			 log\
				 salt\
			 run\
				 salt\