How to download Visual Studio 2017 Community Edition for offline installation

Question

I am trying to get a Visual Studio 2017 Community Edition offline distribution by executing vs Community exe --layout f  vs2017c  as offered in the documentation  vs Community exe downloaded here  or by direct link  but this doesn t work  All I get are 2 files  f  vs2017c vs installer version json and f  vs2017c certificates vs installer opc SignCertificates p12  I have also tried  layout instead of --layout with no luck  What am I doing wrong  By the way  are there ISO files available perhaps   UPDATE  I have installed the certificate  restarted the computer and re-tried running the installer a number of times  Nothing has really changed  A couple of times I could notice something written in red appearing in the console for less than half a second  Finally I have ran CCleaner  with full CCEnhancer custom to-clean list  to clean up everything  again  I have already done this before the first try  and tried again and now it is downloading     UPDATE2   I thought I have succeede but I was wrong  What I have done was a bat file of the following contents   vs Community exe --layout f  vs2017c --lang en-US --add  a list of 133 individual component IDs    As the result of running this command the installer has tried to download all the components  including those I did not select  in all the languages  I only need en-us    I have noticed it is downloading what I don t need  terminated the process and deleted everything for a fresh start  Next time I have only individual workloads instead of listing all the individual components  I have even tried simplifying it to just one workload like  vs Community exe --lang en-US --layout f  vs2017c  --add Microsoft VisualStudio Workload ManagedDesktop   but this just doesn t work  Instead  the following pops up for half a second as the  Give us a minute  We ll be done soon     progress bar finishes     UPDATE3   I have found out that putting  the backslash at the end of the layout path beraks the stuff  I e  vs Community exe --layout f  vs2017c works but vs Community exe --layout f  vs2017c  does not  This is not the only problem  however - listing a number of workloads tohether with  includeRecommended includeOptional after vs Community exe --layout f  vs2017c breaks it too  although it worked as I ve tried it with just one workload and one extra component AND  an important condition  purged the temporary files      UPDATE4   I have managed to grab the f  vs2017c q 2ho resources app layout Setup exe you can see in the window title on the screenshot  which is a little bit tricky as it appears for just some seconds and gets automatically deleted shortly after  but its help output is very different from the one above  It seems that it chain-launched some other exe in the previous case  Its own output is below  no obvious way to specify individual workloads components     Finally I have given up trying to choose individual components and workloads and tried the following with no luck either  vs Community exe --lang en-en --layout f  vs2017c --all --includeRecommended --includeOptional   At the end I have ended up using just vs Community exe --lang en-en --layout f  vs2017c --all - it works and only downloads the language I need  though includes a number of components I don t need actually  The resulting directory size is 18 gigabytes   I ve finished downloading and dot it installed already as by now but the question about how to actually use the layout feature parameters reliably the way they are meant to remains

User · Answer

I have used the exact steps from here and it worked flawlessly : https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/install/install-vs-inconsistent-quality-network

In 3 simple steps:

Step 1 : Download the respective Visual Studio 2017 version from the download page (https://www.visualstudio.com/downloads/)

Step 2: Open your command prompt as Administarator, point to where your Visual studio download exe is and execute the following command (this command is specifically for Web & Desktop development) :

vs_community.exe --layout c:\vs2017layout --add Microsoft.VisualStudio.Workload.ManagedDesktop --add Microsoft.VisualStudio.Workload.NetWeb --add Component.GitHub.VisualStudio --includeOptional --lang en-US

Step 3 : Traverse to the path c:\vs2017layout in your command prompt and then run the following command (this command is specifically for Web & Desktop development)

vs_community.exe --add Microsoft.VisualStudio.Workload.ManagedDesktop --add Microsoft.VisualStudio.Workload.NetWeb --add Component.GitHub.VisualStudio --includeOptional

User · Answer

Here you can download visual studio 2017 initial installer   https   docs microsoft com en-us visualstudio install create-an-offline-installation-of-visual-studio view vs-2017  Run it and after few minutes it will ask what components do you want to install and in the right bottom there will be two option     Install while downloading      Download all  then install   Select any option and click install

User · Answer

It seems that so far you ve just followed the first step of the instructions  headed  Create an offline installation folder   Have you done the second step   Install from the offline installation folder  - that is  install the certificates and then run vs Community exe from inside the folder

User · Answer

The command above worked for me  C  Users marcelo Downloads vs community exe --lang en-en --layout C  VisualStudio2017 --all

User · Answer

You should goto the Layout folder and issue the following command   F  vs2017c gt vs community exe  finalizeInstall   Then it will auto pickup cache components bypass downloading

User · Answer

Saved the  vs professional exe  in my user Download directory  didn t work in any other disk or path  Installed the certificate  without the reboot  Executed the customized  2 languages and some workloads  command from administrative Command Prompt window targetting an offline root folder on a secondary disk  E  vs2017offline     Never thought MS could distribute this way  I understand that people downloading Visual Studio should have advanced knowledge of computers and OS but this is like a jump in time to 30 years back

User · Answer

Check your  temp  folder after download  In my case  download went both in temp folder and one I specified  After download was completed  files from temp folder were not deleted  Also  make sure to have enough space on system partition  or wherever your  temp  is  in the first place  For community edition download is over 16GB for everything

User · Answer

All I wanted were 1  English only and 2  just enough to build a legacy desktop project written in C  No Azure  no mobile development  no  NET  and no other components that I don t know what to do with    Note  Options are in multiple lines for readability  but they should be in 1 line  vs community  xxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxx exe     --lang en-US     --layout    Visual Studio Cummunity 2017      --add Microsoft VisualStudio Workload NativeDesktop      --includeRecommended   I chose  NativeDesktop  from  workload and component ID  site  https   docs microsoft com en-us visualstudio install workload-component-id-vs-community    The result was about 1 6GB downloaded files and 5GB when installed  I m sure I could have removed a few unnecessary components to save space  but the list was rather long  so I stopped there    --includeRecommended  was the key ingredient for me  which included Windows SDK along with other essential things for building the legacy project

User · Answer

Just use the following for a  minimal  C  installation   vs Community exe --layout f  vs2017c --lang en-US --add Microsoft VisualStudio Workload ManagedDesktop   This works for sure  The error in your first commandline was the trailing backslash  Without it it works  You don t have to download all    You can add for example the following workloads  or a subset  to the commandline   Microsoft VisualStudio Workload Data Microsoft VisualStudio Workload NetWeb Microsoft VisualStudio Workload Universal Microsoft VisualStudio Workload NetCoreTools   Sometimes the downloader seems to not like too much packages  But you can download the packages  add the other workloads  step-by-step  this works  Like you want   The interesting thing  The installer afterwards will download  only  the packages you selected which you have NOT downloaded before  so it is quite smart  in this point     Of course there are more packages available

User · Answer

No  there should be an  exe file  vs Community xxxxx exe  directly in you f  vs2017c directory    Just start from the this directory  not from a longer path  the packages downloaded are partly having very long path names  it fails if you start from a longer path

[visual-studio-2017] How to download Visual Studio 2017 Community Edition for offline installation?

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