Creating MSI installation scripts using Orca

ADDLOCAL is an argument you can pass to a MSI installation package when invoking through the command line. It allows you to specify which features you want to install that are available as part of the MSI. Which is great, however how do you know what the features are called?

Orca is the answer. Orca is available in the Windows SDK, although it’s an additional install once you’ve installed the SDK.

Open the MSI using Orca, where you’ll be present with a lot of meta data about the MSI. The table we’re interested in is Feature. Listed are all the feature names which can be passed in the ADDLOCAL argument.

So for example, I wanted to make sure the MSDeploy Service Agent feature is installed (it’s not installed by default so if you install the MSI using quiet mode / no UI, it’s not included). Using Orca I was able to figure out what the name of the Agent Service feature is called according to the MSI (which was MSDeployAgentFeature)

So my powershell script to install MSDeploy looked something like: start-process -filepath msiexec -argumentlist /q, "/l log.txt", "/package webdeploy_x64_en-us.msi", "ADDLOCAL=""MSDeployAgentFeature,MSDeployUIFeature""" –wait ...where I’ve indicated I want the UI and Agent features installed. Without Orca I would have no idea what they are called. Orca can also indicate what public properties are available when invoking the MSI, which is the Property table.