Determining Whether a Silent Install Was Successful

[#1]

Summary

Ways to check for errors and determine if a silent installation was successful

Synopsis

When an installation runs in silent mode, there is no user interaction. As a result, no output is displayed to the end user notifying them whether or not an error or warning has occurred during the installation. This article provides a way to help you determine whether a silent installation was successful or not.

Discussion

INSTALL_SUCCESS Variable
If your installer includes an uninstaller, then you should be able to look in the uninstaller's directory for the installvariables.properties file. This clear-text file contains a list of the variables in your installer and their values at end of installation. This list includes the variable INSTALL_SUCCESS.

$INSTALL_SUCCESS$ is a built-in InstallAnywhere variable with four possible values:

• SUCCESS
• WARNING
• NONFATAL_ERROR
• FATAL_ERROR

$INSTALL_SUCCESS$ will be initialized with a value of SUCCESS and will be updated to one of the other possible values when an error or warning is encountered. You will be able to see the value of INSTALL_SUCCESS in the installvariables.properties file to determine if the install succeeded or if an error or warning occurred.

If you do not include an uninstaller with your installation, you can add an action that outputs $INSTALL_SUCCESS$ to a text file, registry, etc. at the end of the Post-Install phase. Please keep in mind that if an error happened to occur after this action, the outputted value of $INSTALL_SUCCESS$ will not be updated to reflect the error status.


Standard Installation Log
To determine the exact error or warning, as well as further debugging information, the installation log with verbose debug output would need to be generated. The steps to turn on logging with verbose debug output are outlined in the following article: Generating InstallAnywhere Log for Install, Uninstall, and Build in InstallAnywhere 2011 And Later

You can also find a list of installer exit codes in the following HelpNet article: Installer Exit Codes

Additional Information

For additional information on Silent installers, refer to the following Knowledge Base articles:
Running an Installer Silently
Silent Installation Behavior
How to Create Response File to Be Used as Silent Install

[Kavyaa]

Hello

We are facing an issue where there is a wrong version of Java installed in the Linux environment. When we run the silent installation of the installer, we get the following message and installation exits:

[1] 1376573
Preparing to install
Extracting the installation resources from the installer archive...
Configuring the installer for this system's environment...
No Java virtual machine could be found from your PATH
environment variable.  You must install a VM prior to
running this program.
[1]+  Done       

After this when we check the exit code of the process, it shows as 0. Doesn't the Install anywhere silent installation generate any error exit codes? Could you please help.