Building Windows Installers for Conformal Projects

Conformal contains helpers to build Windows installers for your project, using the WiX Toolset . There are two ways you can make an installer:

Locally, on your own Windows computer
With GitHub Actions

This guide will cover both methods.

Common Set-up

These steps need to be done regardless of the method you choose.

Add license information to `about.hbs`

This guide is not legal advice!

It’s important to set licensing terms before distributing your plug-in. Any license information in about.hbs will be shown to users as part of the install process. Note that required license information for dependencies directly included in Cargo.toml or package.json files will be automatically included, but it pays to double check as you are responsible for satisfying the license requirements of any dependencies you distribute as part of the installer.

Your installer package will include code derived from Steinberg’s VST SDK, which is licensed under the MIT license.

Ensure `bundle.json` metadata is correct

In web/<your-plugin-name>/bundle.json, ensure that the id and sig fields are unique to your project.

sig is a four-character code that refers to your plug-in vendor in some formats. While it can be shared between plug-ins, it should be unique to you.
id is the bundle identifier for your plug-in. This should be unique to your plug-in and scoped to your project, something like com.yourvendor.yourplugin.

Building Installer Locally

Install the WiX Toolset

The WiX Toolset v3 is required to build installers. Download and install it from the WiX Toolset releases page . After installation, ensure that candle.exe, light.exe, and heat.exe are available on your PATH.

Build the Installer

Build an installer by running the following command from the root of your project, with <plugin_slug> set to the name of the web package for the plug-in:


bun run package "<plugin_slug>" --dist

The output MSI will be at target/release/<PluginName>.msi.

Building Installer with GitHub Actions

A workflow to build an installer with GitHub Actions is provided in the template project, so it should already be there if you used bun create conformal to create your project. In the template, this workflow will run whenever a version tag is pushed to the repo. If you set up your project some other way, you can copy the workflow in web/create/template/.github/workflows/release.yml.

With the common set-up done, building an installer should happen automatically when you push a version tag to the repository:


git tag v0.1.0 && git push --tag

Both the macOS DMG and Windows MSI will be attached to the GitHub release.

Code Signing

The Windows installer produced by Conformal is not signed. Unsigned installers will show an “unknown publisher” warning to users.

The installer is built to target/release/<PluginName>.msi. To sign it, add steps to the release-windows job in your release workflow after the bun run package step and before the release step. The exact steps depend on your signing provider, please follow their documentation.