Tuesday 27 September 2016

Silent Install Pycharm with shortcut


So I was having an Issue where an installer was not creating a shortcut on the desktop, turns out it was a installer issue but due to the fact we SCCM to deploy we can run a simple powershell script to solve this issue.

Below is the script, that needs to be run as admin.


$InstallPath = "${env:ProgramFiles(x86)}\JetBrains\PyCharm Community Edition 5.0.4\"
$InstallPath
.\pycharm-community-5.0.4.exe /S /D=$InstallPath
# Create a Shortcut with Windows PowerShell
$TargetFile = "$InstallPath\bin\pycharm.exe"
$ShortcutFile = "$env:Public\Desktop\Pycharm.lnk"
$WScriptShell = New-Object -ComObject WScript.Shell
$Shortcut = $WScriptShell.CreateShortcut($ShortcutFile)
$Shortcut.TargetPath = $TargetFile
$Shortcut.Save()


UPDATE 10/07/2017:

I have found the real reason why this is required, when using silent install the installer will always default to non-admin and as such does not do the following:

-          No shortcut gets created in the Public\Desktop
-          No Start Menu entries are created
-          The software is not listed in the “Programs and Features” list in Control Panel
-          No registry key is added to the HKLM:\..\Uninstall branch
-          The uninstall registry key is created in the HKCU branch

this is tracked here:
IDEA-146215

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