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Visual Studio 2017 Offline install - “Unable to download installation files”

After creating an offline installer for Visual Studio 2017 using vs_enterprise.exe --layout c:\vs2017offline we were ready to install Visual Studio on our build servers(which don’t have Internet access).

However when we tried to run the installer, it failed after running for a few minutes with the following error message:

Unable to download installation files

Unable to download install files

This error message was not that useful as we found out that the problem was not related to missing installation files but due to the fact that we forgot to install the required certificates first.

To install the certificates first, you have to

  1. Browse to the "certificates" folder inside the layout folder you created(e.g. c:\vs2017offline\certificates)

  2. Right-click each one and choose Install PFX.

  3. Specify Local machine as target certificate store
  4. Leave the password field empty

More information: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/install/install-certificates-for-visual-studio-offline

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