How to Make Portable Apps Using Winrar

Portable Apps are apps that have been bundled or pre-packaged by a user and may be used straight on a USB thumb drive without the need for installation. Portable Apps can help you address the difficulty of transferring apps from one PC to another by allowing you to launch them directly from your USB flash drive. If you're curious about how the PortableApps website creates Portable Software packages, you can follow this guide on How to Create Portable Apps Using Winrar and Universal Extractor.

How does it Work?

This trick will allow you to create your own Portable apps from a setup file by extracting its content with UniExtractor (or Universal Extractor), repackaging it back to an exe file using Winrar's SFX archives, and adding features like Hide install window and overwrite files, your portable program should be ready to be transferred between computers using USB flash drive and run on the fly without the need to be installed, and you can avoid malware and viruses.

How to Create Portable Apps Using Winrar & UniExtract

- In this example, we are making Firefox as the App to be portable.

1) Download Winrar and Install it.

2) Download Universal Extractor and Install it.

3) Download the setup file of the app ( in this example we use Firefox software).

4) Right-Click the Setup file, then click UniExtract here from the menu to extract the installer files.

Note #1: If UniExtract fails to extract the file, the setup files can be extracted with Winrar.

5) UniExtract will start analyzing the installer, and it will extract the files a few times.

6) You'll see a new Folder containing the insider of the setup file. Now Search for the .Exe file of the Program. (in this example we found Firefox.exe in the Core folder).

7) Now Select All the files available in the same folder as the Exe file and Right Click > Add to Archive

8) In the first tab General check Create SFX Archive, put Compression method to Best for smaller size and easy transfer.

9) Click Advanced tab > Sfx Options > Setup tab in the field of Run after Extraction put the .exe file name (in this example it's Firefox.exe that we found in step 6 ). 

10) Go to the Modes tab and select the option Hide All it will hide all Windows and prompts of the install process. Then go to the Update tab and select the option Overwrite All Files it will overwrite files without prompting the user.

11) Done! You can also change the Icon of the Portable app by going to the Text and Icon tab.