i’m not much of a windows guy anymore, but was asked to make an install script for developers at work who wanted to write node.js code on windows. the problem with node.js development on windows is not so much about node.js itself, but the limitations of the basic design of the language and its solution. with node.js and its event loop-based architecture, it doesn’t excel at computationally intensive code, so its solution is to compile native libraries and use those to get the performance needed.

this solution is quite viable, but this also requires you to be able to compile these extensions. this is where there are a few problems. trying to get a C compiler on a windows box is sort of non-trivial, but what’s worse is that some of the libraries out there aren’t ported to windows and then you are dead in the water.

so if i absolutely had to develop in windows, i’d setup a VM. and if i had to use a VM, i’d use vagrant for headless virtualization management. and if i had to use vagrant, i’d use virtualbox for virtualization because of its built-in integration with vagrant.

but now the problem is there are a bunch of dependencies that need to be installed before you can even start developing on windows: vagrant, virtualbox, some linux OS, node.js in the linux OS and all of the build tools needed for npm installation for the linux VM. now let’s say that you have a team of windows developers and you want to get them setup quickly. how do you do that? well, that was what i was asked to solve and so i decided to make a windows installer that will install all of the dependencies.

it turns out that there is a pretty established solution available: nullsoft scriptable install system. it comes bundled with plenty of examples and though i feel that the scripting language available with NSIS is a little awkward, the documentation and resources available for it make it fairly easy to use.

the trickiest part of the NSIS script was figuring out how to launch an .msi file instead of a standard .exe file. it turns out that you have to invoke it via msiexec.exe.

so great, you can make a windows installer that will install all of your dependencies. spin up a vagrant box, install all of the dependencies in your VM, then package it up and make an installer that will install everything for you. easy! now you will have an automated install of your development environment.