Knowledge required for building a Windows-installer(wrapper)-updater

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I plan to create a PR regarding MSI windows package · Issue #5409 · rclone/rclone · GitHub.
To be specific, I'm trying to make an installer.exe(via NSIS) which can be used by winget to install(which is simply downloading the official zip release for windows and unzipping it.
However, to ensure that this can also be used to update an existing rclone install, I'll have to know the following.

  1. Does rclone create/save settings/configs related files? If so, where(and how can I know it)?
  2. Would simply unzipping the new rclone zip file onto the existing installation work magically, or would it potentially cause duplicate files to exist?(Yes, all rclone process will be terminated before this)
  3. If any, what work is required after updating rclone?

With these information I think it'll be rather easy to make an installer.
Note: after this, I'll PR the build as an github action(if all goes well)

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Note to self(and regarding others): probably (rather than downloading the zip on install) bundling the zip into the installer would be better(though it would require some more work to implement).

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hello and welcome to the forum,

  1. on windows, rclone is a portable app, a single file. if you create a remote, then rclone creates a rclone.conf file.
  2. overwriting a new rclone.exe over an older one, that works no problems.
  3. best to look at the existing install script.
    rclone already has a way to update itself. https://rclone.org/commands/rclone_selfupdate/
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For config file location, see: Documentation

There can also be a cache dir:

--cache-dir string

See also: rclone mount

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You can ask rclone where the config file is using rclone config file.

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