Installation

Installation Guide

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This article contains a walk-through for using the AutoIt Interpreter either from source or as downloaded binaries.
Contents of this article:

• 1a) Prerequisites (without Visual Studio installed)

• 1b) Prerequisites (with Visual Studio installed)

• 2) Download and Build

• 3) Run

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As the Interpreter is based on the .NET Core Framework, you have to download that first. At the time of writing this article (JUN-2020), the Interpreter uses a preview version of .NET 5, however, this might differ in later iterations.

1a) Prerequisites (without Visual Studio installed)

1. First, go to https://dot.net and click on the [Download]-button.

2. You will be redirected to the download page. Should your desired version (e.g. .NET5-preview6) not be listed, go to the following overview page: https://dotnet.microsoft.com/download/dotnet-core or click on [All .NET Core downloads...]

3. Click on the desired version of the .NET Core Framework

4. Choose your target platform from the category '.NET SDK'. This download contains the fully-fledged .NET Core Runtime Environment and Software Development Kit (SDK) which is required to build the AutoIt Interpreter from source (Marked as annotation [1] in the image below).

   Alternatively: Should you not want to download the full Runtime and SDK, please select the appropriate installers from the category '.NET Runtime' (See annotation [2] in the image below).
   Important: If you are on Windows, you must also download the 'Desktop Runtime' for COM-Interfaces and GUI Functions to work (annotation [3]).

   

5. Once downloaded, follow the on-screen installer instructions. Linux users can find a detailed installation guide for their package manager here: https://github.com/dotnet/core/blob/master/release-notes/5.0/preview/5.0.0-preview.6-install-instructions.md

6. Congratulations! You have your prerequisites installed!

1b) Prerequisites (with Visual Studio installed)

Currently (as of JUN-2020), the AutoIt Interpreter uses a preview version of Visual Studio and a preview version of the .NET Core Framework/SDK. Should you not have a preview version installed, head over to https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/vs/preview/.

Note: Visual Studio is not required to compile the project, however, it is highly recommended for active development.

Verify that the Workloads .NET desktop development and.NET Core cross-platform development are selected:

Should you still require a preview version of the .NET Core Framework to be installed on your machine, follow the steps from the Section (1a) of this article.

2) Download and Build the AutoIt Interpreter

To download the current version of the AutoIt Interpreter, go to the releases tab of this repository for the pre-compiled binaries. Otherwise clone the repository using your favourite Git client:

$ mkdir autoit
$ cd autoit
$ git clone git@github.com:Unknown6656/AutoIt-Interpreter.git .
$ cd new
$ dotnet build

After the build completed, go to the sub-folder /new/bin:

$ cd bin

The contents of this directory are the pre-compiled binaries hosted in the releases tab of this repository.

3) Run

The main executable is autoit3.dll. This is wrapped by autoit3.exe on Windows-based systems, or ./autoit3 on Unix-like systems.

To run the Interpreter, type:

• On Windows:

  > autoit3 [...]

• On Unix-like systems:

  $ chmod a+x autoit3       # (first run only)
  $ ./autoit3 [...]

Both commands (Windows and Unix) above are thin wrappers for the underlying command

$ dotnet ./autoit3.dll [...]

A detailed usage reference can be found here.