New setup tools

A new set of installation tools for the Neuro-Ledger® and Neuron® are available. The old setup files have been obsoleted and will not be updated. The old tools were build using the Wix toolset, which deprecated the version that was used, and upgrading to a newer version was not trivial. Instead, a new set of custom installers have been made. These are all simple executable files, but they can do things that traditional setup tools cannot. They are build around a custom installer available in the IoTGateway repository. It is built around *.package and *.manifest files which are easier to manage and distribute. They are already used through for distributing packages, and so there is little additional work required to build a custom installer. It is furthermore an easy task to build new custom installers, as all you need to do is provide the .package files you want to be installed, and change the installation folder and application name, and you’re done.

The new custom installers have an additional new feature that was difficult when using the old installer: You can install multiple instances of the software (or softwares) on the same machine. You can also individually manage, repair or uninstall them, as required. Each individual instance is its own service, with its own service packages, databases, application data, etc. This also means it is easier to test an installation, as you can do it on your development machine, without it interfering with your other instances or development environments. You can also have multiple development environments in parallel.

Other changes:

• The old name of the Neuron® installer was IoTBrokerSetup.exe and IoTBrokerNoJavaSetup.exe. There is now only one setup file called NeuronSetup.exe. It does not install Java. If Java is necessary for integrations with Java-software, it must be installed separately.

• The old installer installed additional software, such as GraphViz and PlantUML for integration with graphs in Markdown. Such integrations are still possible, but you need to install these softwares separately. They are no longer included by default when installing the Neuron® using the new installer.

You can download the new Windows installers following these links:

• NeuronSetup.exe installs the Neuron®, together with the Neuro-Ledger® and IoT Gateway.
• NeuroLedgerSetup.exe installs the Neuro-Ledger® and IoT Gateway.
• IoTGatewaySetup.exe installs only the IoT Gateway.

Note: For historical reasons, the Neuron® package, when being updated, is still called IoTBroker.package when diseminated in the Neuron® network as an update. The Neuron® consists of the IoTGateway.package, the NeuroLedger.package and the Neuron.package files, joined together as the IoTBroker.package file.

#new, #neuron, #neuro-ledger, #install, #features