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.

Starting Our AutoIT Script

We want to check to see if the program is already installed and if so exit, but if not continue with the install. To accomplish this, we will use an If Then statement

So let’s check to see if the file is there. If it is, exit the program:

The editor has auto complete for functions and macros.  The lines we have just entered says to look to see if c:\Program Files\TuxMath\TuxMath.exe or c:\Progam Files (x86)\TuxMath\TuxMath.exe exists and if it does then to exit. This makes working with X86 and X64 operating systems easier.

Next if the program is not already installed we want to tell it what to run and  what user to run as

 

Completely Automating an Install with AutoIT

At this point we could just put an EndIf and allow the end user to finish the installation, but sometimes we have end users who are not sure what to click, or perhaps you want to run this as a logon or logoff script and not have to worry about the end user clicking through everything. Here is where things get fun with AutoIT.

Run the executable that you want to install, but don’t click any of the buttons yet. Go to the Tools menu of the script editor and choose AU3Info or just press Ctrl+F6 (If you don’t see AU3Info you didn’t install the full version of the editor).

In the AU3Info tool, you will see a “Finder Tool”. Click and drag that tool over the first button you want to click. This will allow you to find all the information you need about that button and the window to tell AutoIT that is the button you want to click.  You will want to take note of the Window Title, some of the text that should be unique to that window from the “Visible Text” tab, and the ID from the “Control” tab.

 

Now we will tell the script to wait for the window to open, bring the window to the front if it is not already and click the button. Here is how to do that:

 

When we look inside our parentheses, the first text we have is the window title, then we have some of the window text, this should be the same for all 3 commands, in the ControlClick command we add the ID of the button that we want to click.

Repeat the steps for any additional buttons that need to be clicked.

To end your script just use Endif to close out of your if statement.

I had a few computers that would pop up an “Open File – Security Warning” so added an additional if statement to my script as well as adding a sleep statement to make give time for the warning to pop up since I’m running from a network share. As an alternative, you can add the server’s UNC to your trusted sites list.

Here is my complete script: