Show HN: Inspect and extract files from MSI installers directly in your browser

Hey everyone!

I'm excited to share a small web app I built that allows you to view and extract the contents of Windows MSI installers directly in your browser. It's essentially a web-based "lessmsi" powered by Pyodide.

You can try it out at: https://pymsi.readthedocs.io/en/latest/msi_viewer.html

My motivation for building this was from part of my day job -- I often get Windows MSI installers and need to extract files while preserving the relative directory structure and filenames, as they would appear after a full installation. The existing tools I found were good but limited in which platforms they support: lessmsi works great on Windows, while msitools works for Linux/macOS. Neither is a truly cross-platform solution that works on any major OS.

So we developed pymsi (a pure Python library, available on GitHub at https://github.com/nightlark/pymsi) to handle reading and extracting MSI files from Python. Then I realized that since pymsi has no native dependencies, it could potentially run in a web browser using Pyodide. After a bit of "vibe coding" and fixing some "hallucinated" functions/classes that don't exist in pymsi, the result was this client-side web app.

If you need an MSI file to experiment with, older versions of PowerToys included the installer in .msi form, such as this one: https://github.com/microsoft/PowerToys/releases/download/v0....

Note that the underlying pymsi library hasn't been extensively tested against a bunch of MSI installers yet, so there might still be lingering bugs. If you come across any issues, please don't hesitate to report them in on the GitHub repository (https://github.com/nightlark/pymsi/issues).

I'd love to hear your feedback and answer any questions!

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44331518

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https://pymsi.readthedocs.io/en/latest/msi_viewer.html