Inspect and extract files from MSI installers directly in your browser
Hey everyone! I'm excited to share a small web app I built that allows you to view and extract the contents of Windows MSI installers directly in your browser. It's essentially a web-based "lessmsi" powered by Pyodide. You can try it out at: https://pymsi.readthedocs.io/en/latest/msi_viewer.html My motivation for building this was from part of my day job -- I often get Windows MSI installers and need to extract files while preserving the relative directory structure and filenames, as they would appear after a full installation. The existing tools I found were good…
In plain words
This web app lets users view and extract files from Windows MSI installers directly in a browser without installing software. Built with Pyodide and powered by the pymsi Python library, it preserves the directory structure and filenames as they would appear after installation. It works cross-platform on Windows, macOS, and Linux, addressing limitations of existing tools that are typically restricted to specific operating systems.
written from the facts on this page · September 2026
From the sources
In the maker’s words, at launch
Hey everyone! I'm excited to share a small web app I built that allows you to view and extract the contents of Windows MSI installers directly in your browser. It's essentially a web-based "lessmsi" powered by Pyodide. You can try it out at: https://pymsi.readthedocs.io/en/latest/msi_viewer.html My motivation for building this was from part of my day job -- I often get Windows MSI installers and need to extract files while preserving the relative directory structure and filenames, as they would appear after a full installation. The existing tools I found were good but limited in which platforms they support: lessmsi works great on Windows, while msitools works for Linux/macOS. Neither is a truly cross-platform solution that works on any major OS. So we developed pymsi (a pure Python library, available on GitHub at https://github.com/nightlark/pymsi) to handle reading and extracting MSI files from Python. Then I realized that since pymsi has no native dependencies, it could potentially run in a web browser using Pyodide. After a bit of "vibe coding" and fixing some "hallucinated" functions/classes that don't exist in pymsi, the result was this client-side web app. If you need an MSI file to experiment with, older versions of PowerToys included the installer in .msi form, such as this one: https://github.com/microsoft/PowerToys/releases/download/v0.... Note that the underlying pymsi library hasn't been extensively tested against a bunch of MSI installers yet, so there might still be lingering bugs. If you come across any issues, please don't hesitate to report them in on the GitHub repository (https://github.com/nightlark/pymsi/issues). I'd love to hear your feedback and answer any questions!
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