Creating Portable Apps with WinRAR
DISCLAIMER: I am not responsible for what you do to, or with your applications.
This guide does not work for all applications.
In this tutorial, images come after the steps are explained.
What you will need:
WinRAR :: Offical Link :: LBRC Link
Universal Extractor :: Link
Some Cool Icons (.ico files)
An Application Install File
For this tutorial i will be working with the Newest Version of CCleaner.
Feel free to download this application and work through the steps with me.
Step 1: Universal Extractor (UniExtract)
Run Universal Extractor and browse for the setup file you would like to extract the contents from.
Again, this does not work for all applications. Some applications are packaged with codes that unscramble the contents of the installer before it installs. For example, Installers made in Delphi will not properly unpackage without running the installer.
What Universal Extractor does is it uses multiple methods to see what type of package the install is made with, and how it will go about extracting its contents.
Next, select the destination folder in which you would like the contents to end up in. Generally i choose the same folder as the install for organization sake.
If you installed Universal Extractor, and chose to add the option to add the program to your Windows Shell, simply right click the install file and hit “UniExtract to Subdir”
Notice UniExtract find that the installer was made with 7zip, and uses specific methods to extract the contents.
Now that we have this new folder with all the contents of the install file we can be done with Universal Extractor.
Step 2: Looking deeper
I want you to look at the files that came from this particular installer.
If you run the installer regularly you will see that it asks you if you would like to install Yahoo Toolbar.
Since it gives you the option, there has to be some files in the installer that have to do with Yahoo that we don’t want.
For this installer, we can see the contents of the $TEMP folder are pretty much useless towards the application, to test this, simply SOFT delete (to recycle bin) these files and try and run the main EXE.
So now that we know these files are not needed to run the application, we are going to just delete them for good.
Upon inspecting the contents of the $PLUGINSDIR folder, we can see these are simply files associated with the installer made by 7zip.
We can safely delete these as well. Again, to test this, SOFT delete the folder, run the application, and if everything is ok, just delete it.
The idea of Portable isn’t only that you can run it without installing, but its also important that you try and make your portable applications as small as possible. In the case of CCleaner here, we nearly cut the file size, although small already, by more than half.
This is how your folder should look now.
Step 3: Creating the portable EXE with WinRAR
Select all the contents of your folder, right click, and select “Add to Archive” to bring up the archive creation options.
If you do not have WinRAR in your Windows Shell, you can just run WinRAR, and go to the folder, select all the files, and click “Add”
Note: Do not select the folder to create an archive, this just creates an unnecessary step in the process, simply select all the files instead.
Next, we have the options window for creating a new archive.
Check “Create SFX archive”, this simply makes the archive into a EXE file that can be run without the need for WinRAR on a computer.
Make the “Compression method” “Best”.
And finally, name the file whatever you would like. I prefer to put the name of the program, the version number, and the word Portable encase i give the file to other people.
Your window should look something like this.
Click the “Advanced” tab, and go to the “SFX Options…” menu.
Under the “General” tab change “Path to Extract” to “Create in the current folder”, this will keep everything organized, or in some cases, files wont leave your thumb drive.
Next, under “Run after extraction” put the full name of the EXE file you are trying to run.
In this case, it would be CCleaner.exe. Double check your folder and make sure you have no spelling errors.
Under the “Modes” tab, select “Unpack to temporary folder.
Set Silent Mode to “Hide all”, this makes it so that there is no Command Window that pops up telling you all about the stuff you are extracting.
Some people prefer to have this enabled, but i personally don’t care, i know what it is doing.
Finally, set “Overwrite mode” to “Overwrite all files”. This just makes things easier encase you have to run the program multiple times.
Next, under the “Text and icon” tab, set a title for your SFX archive, don’t mistake this with file name, this is just a formality encase the file is renamed somehow.
Below this, browse for an .ico icon file anywhere on your hard drive. For this example, i just found a random Nvidia icon randomly on my hard drive.
A good way to see all the .ico files on your computer is to run search, and type “*.ico” in the search field. It will find all files ending in “.ico” on your computer.
Once this is done hit “OK” to close the window, then select “OK” in the main archive options window to start the compression of your new SFX Archive.
We should now have a brand new EXE file of CCleaner, 100% portable. Keep in mind, sometimes when you run applications and change options, they create Settings files which would need to be included in the original create steps. This varies from program to program, but keep it in mind.
To test your new Portable Application just run the EXE.
Additional things to notice:
The original installer was 3.13mb, while our newly made Application is a slim 979kb (results my vary).
Not only did we create a perfectly portable app, but we cut the size down by 2/3.
PLEASE NOTE: If the application you are trying to make portable requires a crack, serial, or additional file in the directory, do these things before packaging the application.