I made a quick tool yesterday to convert a program with a bunch of other required files into a single exe. I did some searching for a similar tool but everything I found was either shareware (the phrase shareware on a site usually means it’s from 1996), or expensive with a load of unneeded security features.

Bundler is pretty much as simple as it can be. It creates an exe, then zips up your files and adds them to the back of the exe. When the exe is run it looks at itself, finds the zip file, extracts it and runs the program.

This is great if you have a program you want to distribute that has a few smallish required files. Obviously not so great if the required files are 3GB. It works for what I wanted to use it for, which is to convert this:

into this:

You an test out how that works using this. There’s still a couple of things I need to do. I’d like to get the icon of the embedded program into the launcher. I’m sure that can be done by splicing the memory from one to the other – but I need to look into that further.

You can download bundler here. Just drop a folder onto bundler.exe to create an exe (the folder needs to contain an exe).