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clowd / Clowd.Squirrel

Quick and easy installer and automatic updates for cross-platform dotnet applications
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Custom installation directory #95

Closed Rob-Post closed 2 years ago

Rob-Post commented 2 years ago

Hi,

I was wondering if it's possible to change the installation directory? I would like to install my app in %APPDATA% instead of %LOCALAPPDATA%

caesay commented 2 years ago

Hi, thanks for your inquiry! This is unfortunately not currently possible with Squirrel.

Rob-Post commented 2 years ago

Is this something that is planned for a next version or is it not desired?

caesay commented 2 years ago

In general, the architecture and guiding principle of Squirrel is to be fairly opinionated and as simple as possible for developers: "it just works and you can't screw it up". Installing to anywhere other than %localappdata% can cause problems (eg. apps in roaming make windows logon extremely slow, apps in program files require admin which is not supported and undesirably forces each user on to the same version of an app).

One thing I have considered is allowing the installation location to be configurable by the user at install time, rather than by the developer when you are building packages. Something like YourAppSetup.exe --installLocation C:\path. This still risks the app being broken if the user installs the app to a privileged directory but it's likely a user using this option would know it's their fault and be savvy enough to know how to fix it.

If this feature ever does become available, that's how it will be implemented.