Getting started

Requirements

• A Windows development machine with the stable Rust toolchain and Cargo.
• Source access to the private BSIS repository.
• PowerShell for the commands below.
• A new, writable destination directory for testing. Do not target real application installs.

Bun and Node.js are not required on the target PC to run a compiled BSIS Windows installer. They are used for the documentation website and may be part of future developer tooling.

1. Build the experimental CLI

From the root of the private repository:

cargo test --workspace --all-targets
cargo build --release -p bsis

2. Create a standalone Setup.exe

The example project includes examples/hello/bsis.json and a small payload.

cargo run -p bsis -- build --config examples/hello/bsis.json --runtime target/release/bsis.exe --output BSIS-Hello-Setup.exe

The generated BSIS-Hello-Setup.exe contains both the Windows runtime and compressed payload. The runtime supplied with --runtime must be a Windows executable.

3. Inspect and install

.\BSIS-Hello-Setup.exe inspect
.\BSIS-Hello-Setup.exe install --target "$env:LOCALAPPDATA\BSIS-Hello-Test" --yes
Get-Content "$env:LOCALAPPDATA\BSIS-Hello-Test\app\hello.txt"

The target must be new or an existing empty folder. If it contains user files, the console installer refuses to overwrite them.

4. Uninstall

.\BSIS-Hello-Setup.exe uninstall --target "$env:LOCALAPPDATA\BSIS-Hello-Test" --yes

New installs place an independent Uninstall.exe in the destination directory; you can run it directly without keeping Setup.exe. Older installs may still need an extracted copy of Setup.exe. Windows Apps & Features registration remains unimplemented. Opening Setup.exe directly from a ZIP may use a temporary path that later disappears. For a quoted absolute executable path in PowerShell, use & "C:\\path\\to\\BSIS-Hello-Setup.exe" uninstall ...; when running from the same folder, use .\\BSIS-Hello-Setup.exe. If tracked files have changed, uninstall refuses to remove them.

Next steps

Read the CLI reference for each command and flag, Configuration for the current JSON format and Troubleshooting when something goes wrong.

Working on the documentation website

BSIS.dev is separate from the private engine and uses Next.js, AriaDocs, Tailwind CSS and Bun.

bun install --frozen-lockfile
bun run dev

Before publishing documentation changes:

bun run lint
bunx tsc --noEmit
bun run build

GitHub Actions deploys the statically exported site to BSIS.dev on GitHub Pages.