Chocolatey
Unfinished article
Chocolatey is a package1 manager for Windows. Most OS’s have such a thing. Linux has Apt-Get, yum, dnf and others. Apple Mac’s have Brew.
Chocolatey allows installation or updates of multiple programs at one time.
Installation is best done through Windows Powershell and run as an administrator. Without admin rights you can still install but see the official docs for how it’s done.
How to…
Find a package
Programs/apps are kept in single files (basically zip files) called packages.
If you want to see if Chocolatey has a package you want use choco search followed by the name of the program you want.
1choco search firefox
You don’t have to know the exact name of the package. Chocolatey will generate a list of all relevant files that are a rough match of your search term.
If you want a less fuzzy search you can also use the exact name filter -e or --exact.
1choco search -e firefox
What’s installed on my machine?
If you only want to see what is installed by Chocolatey on your machine use choco list with the -l switch for local.
NB. However from version 2 choco list will only search for local installs.
NB. The alias clist has been deprecated and won’t work after version 2 of Chocolatey.
choco info gives information about a particular package
choco outdated will list any outdated packages
Install a package
Use choco install package-name (NB. cinst package-name is deprecated.)
Uninstall a package
choco uninstall package-name (NB. cuninst is deprecated.)
Update all apps
choco upgrade all -y. The -y means you won’t be prompted to agree to the licence agreements for each app. (NB. cup was teh shortcut alias but that is deprecated and won’t be used from version 2.)
How to install a specific version
To install an app of a specific version use the --version flag.
1choco upgrade hugo-extended --version 0.122.0
Chocolatey won’t let you install an older version of an app by default. However this can be done using the --allow-downgrade flag or --force flag.
See the official docs for more.
Other package managers
For Windows there is also winget which is Microsoft’s own package manager which get packages from the MS Store. This is built in to Windows now
There is also Scoop which works differently and is more more dev focused: specializes in open source and CLI tools.
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Programs/apps are kept in single files (basically zip files) called packages. ↩︎