Look Ma, No GUI! Automating Peakboard Installs from the Command Line

Let’s be honest, clicking through installation wizards is nobody’s idea of a good time. Doing it once is fine, but doing it ten times across ten machines on a Monday morning? That’s where the command line comes to the rescue. Both the Peakboard Designer and the BYOD Runtime come as self-contained executables that happily accept command line parameters for fully silent, unattended installations. No wizard, no clicking, no coffee-spilling moments of distraction mid-install.

Before we dive in, let’s get the boring stuff out of the way. We need admin rights to run both installers, and the target machine must be running at least Windows 10 20H1 (build 19041). Both setups are .NET 8.0 self-contained apps, so we don’t need to worry about installing any runtime first. And if we want to check whether everything went smoothly, an exit code of 0 means all good.

The binaries can be downloaded directly from:

• PeakboardSetup.exe for the Designer
• PeakboardRuntimeSetupUI.exe for the BYOD Runtime

Installing the Peakboard Designer silently

The Designer installer is PeakboardSetup.exe, and it comes with a neat set of parameters that let us control every aspect of the installation:

The quickest way to get a fully silent installation with all the defaults is just one line:

PeakboardSetup.exe Silent=True ContinueInstallation=True

If we want to get fancy and install to a custom directory while skipping the Start menu shortcuts, we go with:

PeakboardSetup.exe Silent=True InstallPath="D:\Peakboard\Designer" CreateStartMenuShortcuts=False

For those of us who prefer the dash syntax in our scripts, that works too:

PeakboardSetup.exe -Silent True -InstallPath "D:\Peakboard\Designer"

Installing the BYOD Runtime silently

The BYOD Runtime installer is PeakboardRuntimeSetupUI.exe. It has a few more knobs to turn than the Designer because the runtime needs to know things like whether it should start automatically with Windows or whether to enforce encrypted connections.

The no-frills silent installation looks like this:

PeakboardRuntimeSetupUI.exe Silent=True ContinueInstallation=True

In a real-world production scenario, we probably want the runtime to launch automatically after a reboot and lock things down with encrypted connections:

PeakboardRuntimeSetupUI.exe Silent=True InstallPath="D:\Peakboard" AddToStartup=True BlockUnencryptedConnection=True

And if we are deploying directly on a Peakboard Box, there is a dedicated flag for that:

PeakboardRuntimeSetupUI.exe Silent=True RunOnPeakboardBox=True

The secret config file

Here is a neat little detail that can make life even easier for large-scale deployments. The Runtime installer checks for a configuration file at C:\ProgramData\Peakboard\LocalState\Setup.config before it starts. This is a simple key-value file that looks like this:

InitialVersion=3.12.0.1
RunOnBox=False
InstallPath=C:\Program Files\Peakboard
RunOnPeakboardBox=False
InstallService=True
CreateStartMenuShortcuts=True
AddToStartup=False
BlockUnencryptedConnection=False
WriteToRegistry=True
ProductName=Peakboard Runtime
VersionNumber=4.2
ProductPublisher=Peakboard GmbH

After the very first installation, this file is created automatically and reflects the settings that were used. The clever part is that we can modify this file before running the installer on another machine. If we pre-deploy a tweaked Setup.config to the target machine, the installer picks up those values as its defaults. And if we still pass command line parameters on top, they override whatever is in the config file. So the hierarchy is: command line beats config file beats built-in defaults. This makes Setup.config perfect for setting organization-wide defaults while still allowing per-machine overrides when needed.

Conclusion

That’s it. No more wizard fatigue. Whether we are rolling out the Designer to a team of engineers or deploying the BYOD Runtime across a fleet of shop floor machines, a single command line is all it takes. And with Setup.config in our back pocket, we can even pre-bake organization-wide defaults and let the installer do the thinking for us. Happy scripting!