I want to set the exit code for my installation, this way I will know why the installation was aborted. I'm using Inno Setup.
3 Answers
From the Inno Setup Help document (from the article "Setup Exit Codes"):
Beginning with Inno Setup 3.0.3, the Setup program may return one of the following exit codes:
0 Setup was successfully run to completion.
1 Setup failed to initialize.
2 The user clicked Cancel in the wizard before the actual installation started, or chose "No" on the opening "This will install..." message box.
3 A fatal error occurred while preparing to move to the next installation phase (for example, from displaying the pre-installation wizard pages to the actual installation process). This should never happen except under the most unusual of circumstances, such as running out of memory or Windows resources.
4 A fatal error occurred during the actual installation process.
Note: Errors that cause an Abort-Retry-Ignore box to be displayed are not fatal errors. If the user chooses Abort at such a message box, exit code
5
will be returned.5 The user clicked Cancel during the actual installation process, or chose Abort at an Abort-Retry-Ignore box.
6 The Setup process was forcefully terminated by the debugger (Run | Terminate was used in the IDE).
You can easily check if the setup ran successfully by confirming that the exit code is 0
. Furthermore:
Any non-zero exit code indicates that Setup was not run to completion.
To answer your question more specifically, you can determine the installation was canceled by observing exit code 2
or 5
.
If you wish to return a custom exit code when Inno would otherwise return 0
, you can define the following event function:
function GetCustomSetupExitCode: Integer;
From the help document (from the article "Pascal Scripting: Event Functions"):
function GetCustomSetupExitCode: Integer;
Return a non zero number to instruct Setup to return a custom exit code. This function is only called if Setup was successfully run to completion and the exit code would have been
0
.

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Tanks a lot. But I mean to set myself the exit code not to use the build-in codes for my specific events. something like exit(88); – Toda Raba Jan 06 '10 at 13:46
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3I see; I've revised my answer accordingly. Note that you can only define a custom exit code if Inno would have otherwise exited with `0`! – Paul Lammertsma Jan 06 '10 at 15:04
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is there any way to do the opposite ? specifying to return `0` when inno would otherwise return `!0` ? – v.oddou Feb 05 '14 at 03:42
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@v.oddou I don't believe that's possible, unless there's some way of intercepting the exit and forcing the process to end using lepe's answer. – Paul Lammertsma Feb 05 '14 at 09:03
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there might be a way by wrapping the exe into another exe that always returns 0. but in the end for my own case, i just set the parent installer to ignore the return code. (otherwise when cancelling the child installer (made with inno) it would rollback everthing) – v.oddou Feb 06 '14 at 03:56
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Where I can see these exit codes getting printed.I added a custom exit code and ran the application using command line but the application terminates without printing any such exit code. – Raulp Oct 27 '14 at 09:23
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1If you're on Windows, [see this answer](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/334879/how-do-i-get-the-application-exit-code-from-a-windows-command-line). On other platforms, the previous exit code is simply returned in `$?`. – Paul Lammertsma Oct 27 '14 at 11:16
Use:
[Code]
procedure ExitProcess(exitCode:integer);
external 'ExitProcess@kernel32.dll stdcall';
procedure SomeEventHere();
begin
if someerror then begin
ExitProcess(9); //Your custom exit code
end;
end;

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This likely leaves temp files behind as the regular Inno Setup cleanup code won't run. – zett42 Feb 24 '23 at 14:23
Did have this same question and found a way to it:
[Code]
var CustomExitCode: integer;
procedure ExitProcess(exitCode:integer);
external 'ExitProcess@kernel32.dll stdcall';
procedure DeinitializeSetup();
begin
if (CustomExitCode <> 0) then
begin
DelTree(ExpandConstant('{tmp}'), True, True, True);
ExitProcess(CustomExitCode);
end;
end;
And now at any point of your setup just set CustomExitCode to the code you want. Example:
function InitializeSetup: Boolean;
begin
// Some check did fail, exiting with custom code
CustomExitCode = -1;
// Let's just close the setup
Result := false;
end;
This way the setup will not terminate abruptly and you can customize the exit code no matter what state the wizard did exit.

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