Question

For a website I’m working on, I need to be able to deliver it to the client so they can run it easily for a presentation. Ideally, they’d run it locally to avoid internet issues, but we always have to give people instructions on how to unzip files, not to unzip them to the temp file, on and on. Is there a clever way to deliver an offline web app and more or less create a “Run” button? Or a very light program that will rebuild the site in a location they choose? They’d like something like a powerpoint where you doubleclick it.

The file is an HTML file with maybe 20 external files (images, JS, CSS) but no server-side code.

I’m guessing no, but you guys are smart and I figure it’s work asking.

Update

You guys figured it out. Here’s a batch script I run after the self-installer that did what I needed nicely.

Here’s the code I ended up using: `

@echo off
MD "%USERPROFILE%\Desktop\SMBInfographic"
MOVE /Y ".\infographic" "%USERPROFILE%\Desktop\InstallFolder"

start /d "C:\Program Files\Internet Explorer" iexplore.exe "%USERPROFILE%\Desktop\InstallFolder\infographic\launch.html"

EXIT

Answer 1

If you don’t mind your team getting into the bad habit of running executables that other people send them, you could use WinZip’s Self-Extracting Executable creator; it’ll provide an .exe file that contains enough of the Zip algorithm to unpack the data contained in the file.

If you buy the expensive version, you can even get it to run a specific command once you’re done — that could kick off a program that runs start index.html, which should start up the browser… (I haven’t tried the professional version, and it’s been years since I last made a self-extracting Zip, but the WinZip team probably won’t dissapoint.)

7zip also provides a self-extractor output; the output would probably even be smaller, due to the different compression techniques used. It’s also free. But I haven’t tried it, not even years ago :), so it gets second-billing in my answer.