Do you have a stubborn piece of software that only comes as an EXE and doesn’t support a silent install? AutoIT, a free application, can be a great tool for deploying these stubborn programs or allowing end users to install approved programs without having administrative rights. In this guide, we will cover automating installs with AutoIT.
You can download AutoIT from here. I recommend downloading and installing the Full Installation and the AutoIT Script Editor, the Full Installation only has a cut down version of the editor.
Once you have AutoIT installed, you can right click on your desktop or in any folder and choose New -> AutoIT v3 Script. Name the script, right click on it and choose “Edit Script”. Edit the Author and Script Function attributes so tthat you know who created the script and what it’s supposed to do. This can be very beneficial if you are sharing scripts with others.
For this demonstration we are going to be installing TuxMath. I recommend saving the executable to a network share that your users only have read access to and pointing the script there to install. If you run the script and the installer from the same directory, a user can gain administrative rights. This is done by renaming another exe file to the name of the installer you are trying to install. The read permissions are important.