xulrunner windows application bundle
Posted 2009-08-12 17:31:50 by oisin.

If like me you use XulRunner and you have to deploy on windows, you'll be interested in making standalone applications. The bundle layout shown on XulRunnerDeploy does not work on windows "out of the box". The main issue is that DLLs will not be found. My fix is to do the following:

  • Get xulrunner-<windows version>.zip and decompress it in a working folder (See XulDownload).
  • Change into this working folder.
  • Copy your application code into the working dir. The application code is the directory containing the application.ini and all sub-folders.
  • You may have to set exe permission on xulrunner-stub.exe and xulrunner.exe
  • Rename the xulrunner-stub.exe into your programs name <my standalone app>.exe

At installer time it will need to register the internal GRE (Gecko Run Time) with "xulrunner.exe -register-user".

Moving your application code into the same directory as the <my standalone app>.exe is a bit ugly. This is required in order for windows to find the DLLs it needs. Without this you'll get errors like "XPCOM not found". You could modify the system path pointing it at the install directory. However this has its own problems I'll not go into here.