MSI for Windows installation

[pjanotti]

(Per comment
on the release repo, before, re-adding an MSI to the release artifacts it is desirable to give visibility to the MSI
behavior)

MSI Design

• There will be one MSI for core and a separate one for contrib, following the current pattern for releases
• It will install the collector as a Windows service:
  • Name: otelcol, display name: “OpenTelemetry Collector” for core
  • Name otelcol-contrib, display name: “OpenTelemetry Collector Contrib” for contrib
• Installation will require Administrative rights:
  • This is required to install Windows services
• Installation will be machine wide:
  • This means no installation per user
• No support for side-by-side installs:
  • Different versions of the collector running as a service are an atypical user case and it is at best a convenience for the developers as such it won’t be supported by the MSI.
• Event Windows log:
  • By default the service will log to the Event Log, a corresponding Event Source will be created during the installation with the same short name as the service.
• Configuration file:
  • Installer will copy a default configuration file to the installation folder, if the user wants to customize the config the recommendation is to NOT modify this file as it is intended to be the standard configuration for the collector and can have breaking changes between collector versions.
  • The default configuration will be replaced on the installation of a new version.
  • It will be possible to specify a custom configuration file during install by specifying the MSI property COLLECTOR_CONFIG_FILE to point to a different configuration file. The user is in charge of ensuring that such a file exists on the given path and is correctly written, otherwise the collector will fail to start.
• Installer won’t validate any configuration parameters:
  • This typically requires custom MSI code and complicates build and testing.

Previous MSI implementation

Links to past implementation of MSI installer:

• Core:
  • Last version
  • Removed via #3892
• Contrib:
  • Removed via #32768

Open questions:

1. Is there any actual demand for Windows 32bit (386) installers?