What about Chocolatey – Part 1?

I mentioned in a prior post that I would write about the Chocolatey package manager and the neat software management it provides for Windows, so here we go.

Chocolatey was the initial framework that Microsoft based their OneGet feature set on in the initial PowerShell 5.0. I am an old Linux-head, so I found this whole package management framework to be awesome and very familiar. If you’ve ever played around with yum on a Linux box or apt-get, you will love using choco for your Windows servers.

I’m still testing and getting familiar with the Windows 10 UI, so I setup choco on my Windows 10 VM. I found the PowerShell install.ps1 script provided on the Chocolatey.org home page to be buggy and temperamental so I opened a cmd prompt using the RunAs Administrator facility and ran the following:

You’ll see several pages of extraction and log info, but at the end you should see:

If you had any PowerShell windows open prior to installing Chocolatey, you’ll need to close those and reopen them to get access to the new environment variables and choco command. The first thing I recommend you do is review the extensive help by running choco /?. You might also want to review the Release Notes for additional information on features and bug fixes in the version you have installed.

You can run choco list to see over 2000 packages available on the Chocolatey repository. I suggest redirecting the output of this command to a text file so that you can search for a string or package name. You can also browse the repository on the website and check out the command reference page for detailed functionality.

In my next post I’ll step through installing a package and checking the results.

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