Nullsoft Scriptable Install System

Nullsoft Scriptable Install System (NSIS) is a "script handler" Open source Windows with minimal requirements, developed by Nullsoft, the creators of Winamp. NSIS has grown in popularity as an alternative to the extensive use of commercial products such as InstallShield and is currently used for a number of applications distributed over the Internet.

NSIS is released under a combination of free software licenses, mainly the zlib/libpng license, thus making NSIS free software.

History

NSIS was created to distribute Winamp. It is based on a previous Nullsoft product, PiMP (Mini Packager plugin), and is also known as SuperPiMP. After version 2.0a0, the project was moved to SourceForge, where developers outside of Nullsoft began working on it in a basic form. NSIS 2.0 was released approximately two years later.

Version 1 of NSIS is in many ways similar to the classic Windows Installer, but it is much easier to code and supports more compression formats. NSIS version 2 has a new GUI interface and supports LZMA compression, multiple languages and a simple plugin system. NSIS version 3 includes optional Unicode support, continues to work on the same versions of Windows, and is also compatible with Windows 10.