NI Package Management Idea Exchange

Our IT department has now opened up using NI Package Manager to install LabVIEW, and is leaving it to us to do these installs, reducing their role largely to managing licensing. This even includes installing the IDE for our coders.

I can't complain that they've opened this up, except that there are a lot of choices to make, not just in what main elements to install, but in option selections in prompts presented by the installers. it would be nice if we could have NIPM build up a script of all the elements we're installing (IDE, extras, drivers) and all the selections we make during this process. It should then save the script when the NIPM session ends, and allow appending an existing script should a script be built up over multiple NIPM sessions that might be interrupted by a restart required by one of the installs.

Ideally these scripts, when run, would either bypass the restarts normally requested after some installs until the end of the complete process, or would auto-continue after restarts that couldn't be skipped. Also important would be having it gather together all license/agreement requirements into a single prompt at the start of the script so that they can all be accepted at the start of the process rather than being prompted as each element install starts, or, better yet, have the script do a "silent" install with all licensing considered to be accepted and no prompts appearing.

Additionally, these scripts should then be editable so that if users discover they need additional drivers or libraries, different versions, or don't need some elements, they can be added to, revised, or removed from the script. It would also be great if we could make scripts that included uninstallations in the script, so scripts to upgrade from one revision to another could be built.

My vision for these scripts is a simple collection of scripts that would let us quickly get any user or test system up and running with everything needed, whether it's a new employee or an existing user or system getting a computer refresh, with minimal hand-holding of the process and no (or minimal) mistakes. My thinking is we could have a small handful of installer scripts that would fit the needs of 90%+ of our different systems that all use LabVIEW, leaving one-off systems to need only a few NIPM runs to complete their setups.

Thanks,

Erik

It would be great if the feed-download command would accept parameters for:

• Downloading a feed that's not in the current configuration (feed is in a directory)
• Including dependencies in the download
• Including EULAs in the download
• Including recommended packages in the download
• Including suggested packages in the download