This repository contains the Docker build files for a container that enables building Windows MSI packages from any system supporting Docker.

Want to build MSI packages on macOS or Linux? Read on.

The precompiled images are available at hub.docker.com/r/dactiv/wix.

docker pull dactiv/wix

The only requirement for building or running these containers is a working installation of Docker.

The container build exposes each of the WiX Toolset executables in the PATH. This means that running WiX's candle.exe is simple as:

docker run --rm dactiv/wix candle

In order to do anything useful with WiX, you need to mount a volume to expose the necessary files to the WiX tools. The default working directory of the container is /wix, so it is easiest to mount the host's working directory to that path:

docker run --rm -v $(pwd):/wix dactiv/wix candle sample.wxs

A small sample configuration is provided in ./sample. To build the sample.msi, run the following commands:

cd sample
docker run --rm -v $(pwd):/wix dactiv/wix candle sample.wxs
docker run --rm -v $(pwd):/wix dactiv/wix light sample.wixobj -sval

The sample.msi will now be in the sample directory.

docker run --rm -v $(pwd):/wix dactiv/wix light sample.wixobj
Windows Installer XML Toolset Linker version
Copyright (c) .NET Foundation and contributors. All rights reserved.

light.exe : error LGHT0216 : An unexpected Win32 exception with error code 0x65B occurred: Function failed.

The workaround for this is to disable validation with the -sval flag:

docker run --rm -v $(pwd):/wix dactiv/wix light sample.wixobj -sval