
Ask HN: Is there any good OSS for interactive Windows automation? - danscan
I am hoping someone who is more familiar with Windows can make a software recommendation for me that&#x27;s central to a new project I&#x27;m starting.<p>I&#x27;m working on a gaming app that involves automatically installing games on Windows.<p>For example, an end-user workflow to install and play GTA V might be:<p>Enter a license key (if you already bought it), OR enter your payment info to buy a license key.<p>An automation action downloads the game, and applies&#x2F;purchases its license via the variables (license key or payment info) specified by the user.<p>I&#x27;m looking for something that&#x27;s easy enough to program interactively (not via code), so that a layperson can create a flow for installing a game, and specify the variables to collect from the end user.
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weinzierl
AutoHotkey[1] is good and OSS. AutoIt[2] is better for automation, it is free
but not OSS. Neither lets you program completely interactively but the
scripting is so simple that a computer literate layperson should be able to do
simple tasks after maybe a day.

If the tasks are more complicated interactive programming wouldn't help you
anyway in my opinion. For example there are several ways to identify a certain
window. They all heave their uses and are more stable or more fragile
depending on the circumstances. A workflow where you just click on a window
wouldn't help you here and neither is a scripting language the biggest road
block. The difficulty is to know enough about the inner workings of Windows
and the software you want to control to create a stable solution. If your
testers can master this they will be OK with a scripting language too.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AutoHotkey](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AutoHotkey)

[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AutoIt](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AutoIt)

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bryanrasmussen
Well this might not meet your needs (and it has been a lot of years since I've
used it because I don't do Windows anymore) but I believe Wix wixtoolset.org
is still the default way of building installers for Windows.

When I used it I built a tool to generate installers for an enterprise product
so that the consultants who were going out to the government organization to
install the product could have a premade installer that did 80% of the work
for them when they got there.

Perhaps you could build what you need if you find a sample installer that
meets your needs, some good examples here
[https://github.com/rstropek/Samples/tree/master/WiXSamples](https://github.com/rstropek/Samples/tree/master/WiXSamples)

