How To Make Create Portable Applications Softwares : Tutorial

You might have seen a lot of Portable versions of different applications like : Portable Yahoo Messenger, Portable Adobe Photoshop and alot more....
Today I am going to tell you how to create your own portable applications. Before starting this tutorial I would like to tell you what are portable applications.
According to Wikipedia definition "A portable application, or portable app for short, is a computer software program that does not need to be installed or copied onto a computer's mass storage device to be executed, running instead from a removable storage device such as a CD-ROM drive, USB flash drive, flash card, or floppy disk"
Lets start :

Requirements :
1) Winrar : You can download it from here.
2) Universal Extractor : Download it from here.

Step1) First take the set up file of the software that you want to make portable. Here I am taking Mozilla Firefox set up file.

Step2) Now install both Winrar and Universal Extractor.

Step3) Now put the set up file in a folder say Gagan. Now right click on the set up file and select UniExtract to Subdir.
Have a look :

Step4) This will extract all the dll files and some folders along with the executable (exe) file. In my case the name of the exe file is setup.exe but it depends upon the software so in your case it will be different. Just copy the whole name along with the extension i.e setup.exe

Step5) Now press Ctrl+A and select all the extracted files and folders and right click on it and select Add to archive.

Have a look :

Step6) Now when you will click on Add to archive a new window will open, its Winrar application. In the right side in General tab put a tick on Create SFX Archive

Step7) Now go to Advance tab at the top and click on SFX Options.

In the Set Up Program in Run After Extraction enter the name of the file along with the extension that your copied in Step4 i.e setup.exe

Step8) Do not press OK yet, there is a job left. In the top bar click on Modes and put a tick on Unpack to temporary folder and also check on Hide All and now press OK to close SFX Options window and press OK again to close Winrar window.

Step9) When you will click OK second time, Winrar will create a file and this is your portable application.
The portable software will look something like this :

Congrats !! You have successfully created a portable application within no time.
I have tried other methods also to create portable softwares but I like this one as its simple and fast.

Do send your feedback and comments !

Posted in: Hacking Tricks