Silent Installation

This is not (or shouldn’t be) a WordPress question. If you remove “desktop App for WordPress” and replace that with ANY other Windows program, the solution will be exactly the same.

There are generally two approaches to deploying software on Windows remotely:

1) Group Policy: If the computers are joined to an AD DC (or whatever the modern equivalent is), then you could use the built-in Group Policy to install any software to the remote machines.

2) RMM/Agent: If the computers are managed via some remote monitoring and management (RMM) platform, then you could script the RMM to deploy any software onto the remote machines. Of course, this presupposes the RMM’s agent is already installed on the remote computer and joined to the RMM platform.

What you cannot do is remotely install software on another computer that’s not already part of some central management/administration you control.

These are general approaches: I’m not familiar with any specific modern tools out there, as I moved out of this industry a long time ago.

As I mentioned from the onset, this is not really a WordPress problem; it is a Windows administration problem. And I’ll recommend you seek help from a Windows-specific or a general sysadmin support forum.

Good luck!

Thank you for replying.

It is actually a WordPress installer issue. There are no written parameters to tell you the command line arguments to install silently. With out parameters, installation fails. I have tried GPO, SCCM, PDQ Deploy and even local command line. We have hundreds of working applications but their parameters for silent installs do no work with the Desktop app executable. Is there such a thing? There isn’t even any help if you use wordpress-com-win32-setup-8.0.3.exe /? (or /h).

Thank you

Jason

I’d still argue it’s a Windows installer problem, but let’s end that quibble here.

Anyhow… have you tried /s or /silent?

Using PowerShell, I was able to install silently (on the local machine) with:

Start-Process -FilePath "C:\path\to\installer.exe" -ArgumentList "/S" -Wait

Thank you George. Using /s or /silent did not work. Your powershell did however. My guess is that the installer wanted a /S (capital S). WordPress should post this info somewhere lol.

Thank you

Jason

Addendum. That Powershell, although it works, only installs for current user. Do you know the proper switch for all users?

I’m not a developer… just an old (grumpy) former SysAdmin ??

The WordPress desktop app is an Electron app, and (I believe) is packaged with Electron Builder. So most (if not all) Electron Builder install flags for Windows should work, eg:

/S – Silent install

/allusers – Install for all users (requires admin previlleges)

/currentuser – Install for current user only (default)

/disableAutoUpdates – Disable autoupdates (Application will not update automatically / User can’t update via dialog )

Note that you can combine some of these flags, but they should all be given as one -ArgumentList parameter. Eg to install silently for all users, try this:

Start-Process -FilePath "C:\path\to\installer.exe" -ArgumentList "/S /allusers" -Wait

No worries at all – Im a grumpy old Team Lead for Help Desks. Drives me nuts when information is not documented. I apprecaite the feedback. Maybe Worpress will jump on the bandwagon and document this info for future users. I now have a working installer through SCCM and Powershell.

Thanks

Jason