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
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.
Once installed, you can copy the folder to a flash drive.
The msiexec command is not strictly needed, which is why I didn’t include it in the docs. It’s useful when you want to avoid installing Anki to the system where you’re preparing the flash drive.
Isn’t providing zip releases the ideal solution? It can be extracted and run easily anywhere with no need to run any commands.
I realize I missed the fact that you totally could choose a custom install location during setup.
zip releases would be the simplest solution I suppose, but I’m thinking a checkbox or radio button during setup for portable installation would be ideal. I don’t know if it’s possible, but I imagine it’s possible to not register anything with Windows and create a shortcut with the install location being the same location for ankidata given that the user chooses the portable option during setup.
The Tor/Mullvad Browser portable installation process through their normal exe is probably the best reference for what I’m trying to describe.
Thanks for your response and I hope this clarifies some things that my post didn’t address.
It’s not possible to do portable installs in the MSI installer as far as I know, so this requires something like a PortableApps launcher, which I’m not sure is worth the effort implementing it.
