Creating an offline installer of Visual Studio 2017

Sometimes, we may need to have an offline copy of the installer so that we can install it to multiple devices without an active or fast internet connection. This will save your bandwidth from downloading the same copy multiple times over the network. The offline installer is big. So, before going further to create the offline copy, make sure that you have an active internet connection available with no limitation of download bandwidth.

1. First, download the Visual Studio setup executable file (web installer) to a drive on your local machine.
2. Now, run the downloaded setup executable with the following arguments (switches) from a command prompt:
   • Add --layout <path>, where <path> is the location where you want the layout to be downloaded. By default, all languages will be downloaded along with all the packages.
   • In case you want to restrict the download to a single language only, you can do so by providing the --lang <language> argument, where <language> is one of the ISO country codes given in the following list. If not specified, support for all localized languages will be downloaded.

As shown in the following screenshot, it will start downloading all the packages part of Visual Studio 2017. As the offline installer is big, it will take plenty of time, depending on the speed of your internet network:

Once the download completes, go to the folder where you downloaded the packages (in our case, it's C:\VS2017\) and run the installer file, that is, vs_enterprise.exe, for example. Then, follow the same steps as mentioned earlier to select the required Workloads and/or Individual components to start the installation process.