Creating an installer

At this point, you can theoretically slap your dist folder on a USB stick as a portable GIS application or share it with others by means of a ZIP archive. This is fine up to a certain point, but is not the most professional or credible way to distribute your application if you are aiming for a wider audience. In order to run the application, the user, including yourself, has to locate the EXE file far down the long list of oddly named files they don't understand. This is just too much of the gory details and manual work that should have come straight out of the box.

More often, people are used to receiving an installer file that guides the user to install the program in a more permanent location and that creates the shortcuts from them. This not only seems more professional, but also takes care of the more advanced steps for the user. As the final step, we will create such an installer for our GIS application, using the widely recommended installation software Inno Setup...