Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.
Portable installation flow on Windows could be smoother as current methods are not well documented.
Following the method to extract the 26.05 msi from closed issue #4813 at
suggests using
msiexec /a drive1:\path\to\msi /qb TARGETDIR=drive2:\path\to\extract\folder
from https://superuser.com/a/307679
produces 2 files
- anki-26.05-win-x64.msi
- PFiles64
- Anki
- …
- Anki
Describe the solution you’d like
Clearer documentation is always welcome, but it seems that Briefcase supports user defined custom install locations other than the 2: this user and all user options.
On Beeware’s Briefcase Github
and under features on release: 0.3.26 (2025-12-04)
mentions: Windows MSI installers now provide the option for users to configure the install directory for apps. (#2553)
So if a user can define the folder to extract at install time, extraction would be more intuitive
Describe alternatives you’ve considered
I have not tried alternative ways to unpack the msi and run anki portably.
I have used the msiexec /a path1 /qb path2 method to install to flash drive and followed current documentation to run anki portably with no issues so far.
Thanks in advance for reading and the team did a great job with the release this week!
I suggest adding a text box with a default install location like how the installer for 25.07.2 worked if briefcase allows. If that is infeasible for technical reasons, documentation update would be greatly appreciated and a zip release for year or month releases in year.month.patch would work as well though less ideal.
Any thoughts?