How to set up NSIS

This guide shows you how to set up your environment to build the CEA Installer.

The installer for the CEA is made with NSIS. You can download NSIS from https://nsis.sourceforge.io/Main_Page. The current version is 3.04. Install the file nsis-3.04-setup.exe with the default settings.

The CEA ships it’s Python environment as a .7z file and you’ll need to install a pluginto avoid the message “Plugin not found, cannot call Nsis7z::ExtractWithDetails”. Install the NSIS7z plugin by copying the contents to the NSIS installation location - it was C:\Program Files (x86)\NSIS on my machine.

Do the same for the Inetc plugin. Now you should be able to compile the installer with NSIS. The easiest way to do that is to right-click on the file CityEnergyAnalyst\setup\cityenergyanalyst.nsi in Windows Explorer and choose “Compile NSIS Script”.

If you get an error message “Can’t open output file”, then you might need to manually create the folder CityEnergyAnalyst\setup\Output.