Friday 15 November 2013

Exit codes in msi installers created with Wix

There was (is?) a bug in Wix that prevented successful creation of an SSL binding in IIS 7.5, so in order to get around this issue, I wrote a custom action to do this.

A failure in this custom action will not stop the installation*, which means that the exit code will be driven by the custom action failure, which will lead to the exit code being 1603 but the product installing, since the failure is relating to setting the certificate for a webpage, this actually has no effect as the newly installed website picks up the old certificate.

The problem was in our install scripts, where we check on the exit code to ascertain whether the installation was successful, which it wasn't as the exit code was 1603 but since the app was actually there this lead to a lot of confusion and head scratching.

Thought I'd share in case somebody does something as a stupid as I did.

*I've edited the custom action code so that it does not always return success now. There was a perfectly valid reason for the code to always return a success value and I will talk about it as soon as I find it.

Selected output from the install log file:

CustomAction UpdateBinding returned actual error code 1603 (note this may not be 100% accurate if translation happened inside sandbox)
UpdateBinding. Return value 3.
INSTALL. Return value 3.

Product:  Portal -- Installation failed.
Windows Installer installed the product. Product Name: Portal. Product Version: 1.3.3.7. Product Language: 1033. Manufacturer: Yo! Ltd. Installation success or error status: 1603.

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