Candle.exe

Candle, the WiX compiler, can be run from the command line to build your WiX source files (.wxs). Behind the scenes, Visual Studio is really just calling this tool for you. Compiling a WiX source file creates a WiX object file (.wixobj). These are later processed by Light, the WiX linker/binder, to create the final MSI. A simple example of using Candle would be where we simply pass it the path to a .wxs file:

"%WIX%bin\candle" Product.wxs

This will compile the Product.wxs file that's in the current directory and create an object file called Product.wixobj. I've used the %WIX% environment variable that expands to C:\Program Files (x86)\WiX Toolset v3.6\. This variable is available after you've installed WiX. The candle.exe file is located in the WiX bin directory, though, so we need to include that folder in the path.

Note

To make accessing the WiX command-line tools easy, you should consider adding %WIX%bin to your PATH environment variable. Right-click on Computer in your Start...