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1Password has a CLI tool that’s very helpful for integrating into things like setup scripts and handling development secrets more securely.

Unfortunately, on Windows, there’s no installer. Instead, you’re prompted to extract an archive, create the destination directory and add it to your PATH. This is annoying once, impractical to do multiple times and enough of a hurdle for others to be quite a pain, especially when you want to keep up to date with the most recent version.

I’m sure 1Password will release one eventually, but for now, I’ve put together a quick project to make installers that you can find on GitHub. On the releases page, you can find built versions for i386 and amd64.

I’ll keep these updated until 1Password releases their own, but please let me know if you see any problems (and if you find them useful too)! I would like to have these code signed eventually, but for now, that’s not something I can do.

This project initially came out of a frantic evening back in December 2022 where I got caught up in trying to assemble a basic installer with WiX Toolset, initially inspired by trying to resolve an installation issue where we’ve been side-loading an enterprise UWP app. Whilst there’s much more to do (and another blog post to go with that topic), assembling the missing installer for the 1Password CLI seemed like an excellent first step.

I elected to use WiX v3, instead of v4 as v3 has much better information about it. Using v3 meant I wasn’t also trying to understand how to build installers at the same time as trying to understand a whole new version of a tool along with the rest of the community, and there’s a lot of “TODO: WiX v4 documentation is under development.” in the docs, which wasn’t too inspiring.

As installer projects go, it’s pretty straightforward. There’s two build architectures defined, along with a set of platform-dependent variables (in Config.wxi):

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
 <Include>
 <?if $(var.Platform) = x64?>
 <?define PlatformProductName = "1Password CLI (x64)"?>
 <?define PlatformUpgradeCode = "D7D4A655-76AB-45C9-B50F-0A8C1009E8F5"?>
 <?define PlatformProgramFilesFolder = "ProgramFiles64Folder"?>
 <?else ?>
 <?define PlatformProductName = "1Password CLI (x86)"?>
 <?define PlatformUpgradeCode = "E21CFAE2-49F0-489C-A069-437374D61DA5"?>
 <?define PlatformProgramFilesFolder = "ProgramFilesFolder"?>
 <?endif ?>
 </Include>

In the main Product.wxs file, first, the target directory is setup:

<Directory Id="TARGETDIR" Name="SourceDir">
    <Directory Id="$(var.PlatformProgramFilesFolder)">
        <Directory Id="INSTALLFOLDER" Name="1Password CLI" />
    </Directory>
</Directory>

Then a ComponentGroup is defined that places the executable (kept at the root of the project) and sets up the environment variable:

<ComponentGroup Directory="INSTALLFOLDER" Id="ProductComponentGroup">
    <Component Id="cmp_op.exe" Guid="*">
        <?if $(var.Platform) = x64 ?>
        <File KeyPath="yes" Name="op.exe" Source="op_x64.exe" />
        <?else ?>
        <File KeyPath="yes" Name="op.exe" Source="op_x86.exe" />
        <?endif ?>
    </Component>
    <Component Id="cmp_EnvironmentVariable" Guid="46D0B3FB-60B3-4F08-A911-CC03F3907DC2" KeyPath="yes">
        <Environment Id="InstallPath"
            Name="Path"
            Value="[INSTALLFOLDER]"
            Action="set"
            System="yes"
            Part="last"
            Separator=";" />
    </Component>
    <Component Id="cmp_RegistryEntry" Guid="*">
        <RegistryKey Root='HKLM' Key='Software\[Manufacturer]\[ProductName]'>
            <RegistryValue KeyPath='yes' Type='string' Name='Install location' Value='[INSTALLFOLDER]' />
        </RegistryKey>
    </Component>
</ComponentGroup>

Compiling independently for each architecture builds an installer in 1PasswordCliInstaller\bin\Release with this setup.

kurtanr’s WiXInstallerExamples project was very helpful in trying to put this together, and many more examples if you find yourself trying to do something similar.