Silent Installation of Vectorworks 2013

NOTE: This article is intended for IT professionals with an understanding of the command line/terminal interface. 

This article is not intended for all users and is not a required procedure for installing Vectorworks in a standard work environment. 

Do not use these steps unless you are specifically attempting to initiate a silent install of Vectorworks in a network environment or are specifically instructed to do so by Vectorworks Technical Support.

The Vectorworks installer provides a command line interface for either pre-populating options or driving a silent installation from the command line.

To run a silent installation, the first required option is '-q'.  This tells the installer to not present a GUI to the user, and install strictly based off of settings given to it by resources/vwinstaller.cfg (found in the appm bundle on the Mac platform) and any command line arguments given. 

When doing a silent installation, there are four required arguments:

        -u      user name

        -c      company name

        -s      serial number

        -d      installation destination

Options:

 -h

--help

show this help message and exit

-c 

COMPANY

--company=COMPANY

company name

 -C 

CONFIG

--config=CONFIG

alternate location for configuration file

-d 

DESTINATION

--destination=DESTINATION

destination to install files to

-o 

LOGOUTPUT 

--logging-output=LOGOUTPUT

location to write log

-p 

PACKAGES

--packages=PACKAGES

location of packages directory

-q 

--quiet

do a silent install (no GUI)

-m 

MODULE

--module-installation=MODULE

install a module only

-s 

SERIAL 

--serial=SERIAL

serial number to use for installation

-u 

USER 

--user=USER

user's name

 -U

--update

run as updater

-v 

VERBOSITY 

--verbosity=VERBOSITY

set the logging threshold, can be set to CRITICAL,ERROR, WARNING, INFO, DEBUG


Mac OSX:

Insert the Vectorworks installation DVD, or mount the downloaded installation disk image.

Open Terminal.app (found in /Applications/Utilities)

Change directory to the newly mounted directory:

If you are using physical media (ie a DVD or CD), you will enter the following command:

cd /Volumes/Vectorworks

If you are using a downloadable installer you will need to enter the exact name of the image file after it has been mounted, ie:

cd /Volumes/Vectorworks2013-SeriesE-Full

You can also type, cd /Volumes/Vector and then hit the tab key, the rest of the path should be completed for you.  

Hit enter.  If you see no response, it has completed successfully.

To install, enter the following, all on one line with USERNAME, COMPANYNAME and CXXUSE-ABCDEF-GHIJKL-SRNMBR replaced with your user name, company and serial number respectively first:

sudo InstallVectorworks.app/Contents/MacOS/InstallVectorworks -q -u "USERNAME" -c "COMPANYNAME" -s CXXUSE-ABCDEF-GHIJKL-SRNMBR -d /Applications/Vectorworks2013

Note that if you see a message that says "[WARNING ] Failure to import builddb." you can safely ignore it.  You can also safely ignore a message saying "failed due to bad configuration" during installation, that is just the Adobe AIR installer, and generally this means AIR is already installed.  When the installation is finished, control will return to Terminal.app.

The instructions are identical for an updater, aside from modifying them for differing filenames (UpdateVectorworks.app, for instance)

Windows:

Open a command prompt. (If installing on Windows 7 or Windows Vista you may need to run the command prompt as an administrator.)
 

Insert your physical media, or unzip the downloadable installer or updater.  Navigate to the location of the installer on the command line ie:

DVD:

D:

Downloaded Installer: 

C:\Users\UserName\Downloads 

In the same directory as InstallVectorworks.exe (or UpdateVectorworks.exe), issue the following command with USERNAME, COMPANYNAME and CXXUSE-ABCDEF-GHIJKL-SRNMBR replaced with your user name, company and serial number respectively first:
 

InstallVectorworks.exe -q -u "USERNAME" -c "COMPANYNAME" -s CXXUSE-ABCDEF-GHIJKL-SRNMBR -d "C:\Program Files\Vectorworks2013"

Due to a issue with supporting both the GUI and CLI versions of the installer, the installer will immediately return control to the command line.  This is normal.  The installer will continue installing in the background into your destination.  You can verify if it is complete by examining the file InstallerLog.txt (or UpdaterLog.txt) to see if it says "Silent Installation Complete" on the line immediately preceding "Program terminated normally".

The instructions are identical for an updater, aside from modifying them for differing filenames (UpdateVectorworks.exe, for instance)