lessmsi

A tool to view and extract the contents of a Windows Installer (.msi) file.

We recommend you install it with our chocolatey package by simply typing

choco install lessmsi

at the command line, but you can Download and unzip it if you want too.

Don't use chocolatey? You should. Visit chocolatey.github.io to get started.

lessmsi

This is a utility with a graphical user interface and a command line interface that can be used to view and extract the contents of an MSI file.

To use it, after downloading the zip file, double-click lessmsi.exe to run the application and you should see a screen like the following:

lessmsi Files Tab screenshot

You can also extract files from the command line. This has been used in automated scripts to extract files or information from an MSI. To extract from the command line:

lessmsi x <msiFileName> [<outouptDir>]

For more information on command line usage see the Command Line documentation.

Additional Features

Windows Explorer Integration

Lessmsi also integrates with Windows Explorer so that you can right-click on a Windows Installer file (.msi file) and select "Extract Files" to extract it into a folder right there:

lessmsi Explorer Integration screenshot

Just select Preferences from the Edit menu to enable (or disable) the explorer integration:

lessmsi Preferences Dialog screenshot

MSI Table Viewer

Windows Installer files (.msi files) are based on an internal database of tables. lessmsi features a viewer for those tables. This is useful for people who work a lot with installers.

lessmsi Table Tab screenshot

Suggestion? Problem? Comment?

If you have a problem please submit it by clicking in the Issue tracker and I'll look into it when I can.

Contributions

Pull requests are welcome! Just make sure the Travis-CI build (compile only) passes and you run unit tests and I'll merge your contributions ASAP! The Issues app has an indication of some of the plans.

Originally from Scott Willeke's blog. Previously hosted at google code (code.google.com/p/lessmsi/). It was also called Less Msiérables as well as lessmsi.