The look & feel of installers is now customizable. By default, the look and feel is set to FlatLaf, a cross-platform look & feel with automatic detection of dark or light mode.

JDK providers for Amazon Corretto and Azul Zulu have been added to install4j. To use these JDKs, you no longer have to pre-create bundles yourself on all required platforms, but can let install4j do this as part of the build.

install4j can now produce universal binaries for macOS to support Intel and Apple Silicon at the same time. In the media wizard, you can select the "Universal binaries" architecture on the "Installation options" step.

JRE bundling is now the default. Since Java 9 and the shift from the Oracle JRE to OpenJDK distributions, the concept of public JRE installations has become less and less important. This is why new projects are now configured with an AdoptOpenJDK of the current LTS version and new media files are configured to bundle a JRE by default.

Warnings have been improved. The warning count is now printed in the build summary and the text color is orange if there was a warning. For command line builds, you can force the build to fail in that case if you pass the --fail-on-warning command line argument or set the corresponding attributes in the Gradle, Ant and Maven plugins.

A Maven plugin has been added. Previously, Maven integration was only available through a third party plugin. Now, the latest features will be available immediately when a new version of install4j is released.

To get started, see the pom.xml file in the "hello" sample project. In the configuration section of the plugin, you can add all options that can be passed to the command line compiler.

  <plugin>
    <groupId>com.install4j</groupId>
    <artifactId>install4j-maven</artifactId>
    <version>9.0</version>
    <executions>
      <execution>
        <id>install4j</id>
        <phase>package</phase>
        <goals>
          <goal>compile</goal>
        </goals>
        <configuration>
          <installDir>/path/to/install4j</installDir>
          <projectFile>${project.basedir}/hello.install4j</projectFile>
        </configuration>
      </execution>
    </executions>
  </plugin>
      

In the above example, the install4j installation directory is specified. Alternatively, you can do that in the settings.xml file where you can also define the license key and keystore passwords.

  <profiles>
    <profile>
      <id>development</id>
      <properties>
        <install4j.home>/path/to/install4j</install4j.home>
        <install4j.licenseKey>CHANGEME</install4j.licenseKey>
        <install4j.winKeystorePassword>SECRET</install4j.winKeystorePassword>
        <install4j.macKeystorePassword>SECRET</install4j.macKeystorePassword>
      </properties>
    </profile>
  </profiles>
  <activeProfiles>
    <activeProfile>development</activeProfile>
  </activeProfiles>
      

In addition to compiling projects, you can also use the create-jre-bundle Mojo to pre-create JRE bundles. See the documentation for more details.

macOS single bundles archives now have a configurable setup application. The first time a new archive installation or update is run by the user, the configured installer application is launched. This means that you can use screens and actions to perform setup tasks that you would otherwise include into an installer.

To get the look & feel of the installer, you have to choose the "Launch in a new process" check box. If you launch the installer application in the same process, it will use the current look & feel. This is not recommended for JavaFX or SWT applications.

Linux RPM and DEB archives now have configurable post-installation and pre-uninstallation applications. On the "Installation options" step of the media wizard, additional installation actions are now configurable.

Previously, Linux archives always performed a set of default actions like adding symlinks and installing services. Additional steps could only be performed with shell scripts in the "Extra scripts" step for the various phases of the installation and uninstallation.

Since install4j 9, you can choose to either disable extra installation actions completely or to choose custom installer applications for the post-installation and pre-uninstallation phase.

The "Request privileges" action can now elevate privileges on Linux. In previous versions, this was only implemented for Windows and macOS. The "Linux privilege requirement" property can take one of three values: "None" and "Require root" correspond to the "Show failure if current user is not root" property in previous versions of install4j. If the property is set to "Try to obtain privileges", the installer will start a helper process with pkexec in GUI mode and with sudo or su in console mode.

Search for IDs, names, property values and comments has been implemented in the "Screens & Actions" step, the "Styles" step, as well as form component dialogs.

There are two separate search actions, one for searching IDs, and one for searching various text values, both are accessible from the search button or through their keyboard shortcuts.

install4j 9 allows more flexible configuration of top-level files in DMGs. Top-level files appear in the Finder next to the launcher or the installer when you mount the DMG. You also need them to style DMGs.

In addition to single files and symbolic links, you can now add a .tar.gz file to include another application, an external installer or documentation to the DMG.

The install4j compiler can now preserve internal symbolic links in the distribution tree for non-Windows media files. On the "Files->File Options" step, the corresponding option can be deselected if this behavior is not desired.

The restart behavior of the "Install a service" action can now be customized. The pause before restarting, the maximum number of restarts as well as the time threshold after which the failure count is reset are configurable as child properties of the "Restart on failure" property.

In unattended mode with progress dialog, alerts can optionally be displayed. This new mode can be activated with the "Show alerts" property for installer applications or the -alerts command line parameter.

The Unix default directory mode is now used for manual directory entries in the distribution tree and can be overridden when editing a manual directory entry. The default mode is configured on the "Files->File Options" step.

Custom installer applications now have a "Create executable" property to prevent the creation of executables. In this case, the custom installer application can only be launched through the ApplicationLauncher API and through launcher integrations.

Progress information can be obtained when using the ApplicationLauncher API. Update downloaders and other installer applications are often launched with via ApplicationLauncher.launchApplication or ApplicationLauncher.launchApplicationInProcess in unattended mode.

Previously, there was no way to get progress information from the launched application, you could only wait until it was finished. Since install4j 9, the callback that is passed to the ApplicationLauncher API has a method createProgressListener that can be overridden to return your own implementation. That progress listener then receives all progress information including status messages, screen and action IDs as well as progress percentages.

The "HelloGui" class in the "hello" sample project shows you how to do that.

  ApplicationLauncher.launchApplication("<ID>", null, true,
      new ApplicationLauncher.Callback() {
          @Override
          public void exited(int exitValue) {
          }

          @Override
          public void prepareShutdown() {
          }

          @Override
          public ApplicationLauncher.ProgressListener createProgressListener() {
              return new ApplicationLauncher.ProgressListenerAdapter() {
                  @Override
                  public void percentCompleted(int value) {
                      // TODO use
                  }

                  @Override
                  public void indeterminateProgress(boolean indeterminateProgress) {
                      // TODO use
                  }

                  //TODO override other methods as required
              };
          }
      }
  );