Every now and then, I needed a way to share a modpack with others easily. That's where I made TinyModPack - a tiny modpack packager and installer. With a simple modpack.properties file, modpack makers can specify which files need to be packaged, and the modpack creator will automatically wrap everything inside an executable .jar. This jar can then be distributed and opened by players to have the modpack installed.
The installer installs the modpack as a Minecraft Launcher profile. No external launchers necessary!
Note that this installer does not install Forge - players still have to install that by themselves. Also, that this tool is very simple and comes without bells and whistles. It just packages and extracts.
How to make a modpack? Copy TinyModPack.jar to your modpack directory. Then create a modpack.properties file with the following content:
name=My Awesome Modpack # internal modpack name
files=mods;config;scripts # list files and folders that need to be compressed in here
output=MyModPack.jar
version=0.1 # Up to you to put something in here, later on this could be used for self-updating modpacks
recompress=false # Recompression flag, see below
The recompression flag, if set to true, will extract the files of each mod, recompress them with LZMA (7zip encoding), and then reassembles them afterwards. This typically decreases modpack size by 25%, but I suspect that some mods don't like having their jar's recompressed (the resulting jars are not an exact copy). So if you enable it, make sure to test if everything works well.
The modpacks will be installed in /Modpacks/. Also, installing a modpack in an existing directory will erase the folders mentioned in the files list. This means that, if you didn't include the saves directory, savegames will be preserved, while files that are no longer in the pack will be removed. This is useful if you want to upgrade your modpack with this mechanism (you don't have to uninstall) but this can have unforeseen consequences if data is saved in these directories.
A modpack can also be extracted to a server from a command line with 'java -jar MyModpack.jar --installServer'. Again, keep in mind that you still have to install Minecraft, Forge and its libraries manually.
Have fun!