Written in Delphi Type Setup creator | Operating system | |
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Developer(s) Jordan Russell and Martijn Laan Initial release 1997; 20 years ago (1997) Stable release 5.5.9 / April 6, 2016; 10 months ago (2016-04-06) | ||
Inno Setup is a free software script-driven installation system created in Delphi by Jordan Russell. The first version was released in 1997.
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History
Since Jordan Russell wasn't satisfied with InstallShield Express which he had received upon purchase of Borland Delphi, he decided to make his own installer. At first, Inno Setup was little known. The first public version was 1.09..
To make an installation package with version 1.09, an “ISS.TXT” file needed to be created in the installation directory. In the file, the user needed to supply variables and values which are still used in Inno Setup today. These variables served as the configuration of the installation package but many other features could not be changed. The installation compiler had no editor and was more of a shell to compile scripts.
Throughout Inno Setup's development, it was becoming more widely used. Since Inno Setup was and still is free and open source, many software companies started switching to the open source solution in software installation. Since Inno Setup was based around scripting, fans of Inno Setup started ISTool and ScriptMaker to aid in visual and simpler ways to make installations for Inno Setup.
Inno Setup has won many awards including the Shareware Industry Awards three times in a row - from 2002 to 2004.
Many people have taken Inno Setup source code and used it to develop third-party versions of Inno Setup. An example is My Inno Setup Extensions by Martijn Laan, which was incorporated into Inno Setup in June 2003.