Generating Release Installers

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When you are ready to release your project, you can generate installers for your players. The mod SDK currently supports generating installers for Windows and macOS only. If you would like to support additional platforms then please consider filing a pull request!

Automatic builds

We recommend that mods configure automatic builds using Travis CI. This allows you to draft a release through the GitHub web interface, and have your mod installers build automatically "in the cloud" using the same infrastructure as the main OpenRA releases.

• Review the packaging configuration in mod.config and update as necessary
• Follow the Travis CI Setup Guide to enable Travis CI integration
• When you are ready to push a new release, go to the Releases section of your repository and press the "Draft a new release" button.
• Enter a tag name (which will be used as the version for the release) and give the release a human-readable title and description.
• Travis CI will now automatically generate installers and upload them to the release page. We recommend opening your Travis CI dashboard to follow the build process so that you can respond to and fix any errors that might occur.

Manual builds

If you wish to manually build installers for testing or private release, then you can run the packaging scripts manually from a Linux or macOS machine.

• Review the packaging configuration in mod.config and update as necessary.
• Open a terminal in the SDK root directory.
• Run ./packaging/package-all.sh <version tag> <path to output directory>. The version tag will be automatically written into your mod.yaml and installer filenames. For example, to compile an "alpha-1.0" release and save the output files to your home directory, you would run ./packaging/package-all.sh alpha-1.0 ~.

If you see the error error CS8001: Warning as Error: SDK path could not be resolved then it means that your distro's mono packages do not support creating portable builds. Follow the instructions on the Mono website to switch to the upstream Mono packages which include the required support files. Alternatively, you can modify your local copy of the packaging scripts to remove the -sdk:4.5 arguments, but please note that this will break compatibility for your users who want to play your mod on older versions of Mono and the .NET Framework.