Chocolatey is the Windows Package Manager You Were Waiting For

Linux fans who are using Windows, this one’s for you.

Chocolatey is a command line interface based application installer for Windows. It’s based on a developer-centric package manager called NuGet.

It was designed as a decentralized framework for quickly installing applications and tools that you need. Unlike manual installations, Chocolatey adds, updates and uninstall programs using very little user interaction.

How Does it Work?

Chocolatey makes installing programs much easier and efficient than having to manually install them.

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With a single console command, Chocolatey downloads the installation file from the internet and takes care of the installation. It can also install multiple programs at once.

The installation files are uploaded, updated and store on the GitHub repository. Currently there are over 4000 packages on the repository.

How Do I Use It?

To start using Chocolatey, head on over to their website and click on the “Install Chocolatey Now” button.

You’ll then have to open the command prompt on your computer as an administrator. You will have to be using PowerShell. If you don’t know what that is, it’s pretty safe to say you don’t need a package manager like this on Windows.

Copy the following line of code onto the command prompt and press enter:

@powershell -NoProfile -ExecutionPolicy Bypass -Command “iex ((New-Object System.Net.WebClient).DownloadString(‘https://chocolatey.org/install.ps1’))” && SET PATH=%PATH%;%ALLUSERSPROFILE%\chocolatey\bin

 

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Your computer will now take care of the rest of the installation process. Once Chocolatey is done installing, you’ll have to restart the command prompt.

The first command you can type to check whether Chocolatey is working is “choco /?” (without the quotes). This command gives the listing of all the different things you can pass in Chocolatey.

The syntax to install a program through Choco is “choco install [program name]” (without the quotes). In the example here, we’ll download 7zip.

To start downloading it, type “choco install 7zip”. After that Choco will only bug you once to confirm whether you want to run the script or not. After that it will complete the installation process and notify you.

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Keep in mind that you should know the package name of the program you are about to install otherwise it will simply not download it. For example with Google Chrome, you can’t just write “choco install chrome”. You have to write it completely as “choco install google-chrome-x64”.

For a complete list of all the packages, visit this link.

So there you go, it’s that easy. You might seem to recall that we wrote a similar article on Ninite. The difference between Ninite and Chocolatey is that Ninite is not focused towards developers and developer tools.

Also, in Chocolatey, if any program has any dependencies (such as the .NET framework or DirectX), it will install that too.

Currently there are 4064 community packages available on Chocolatey for downloads and this number is increasing. So basically, everything you could ever need to install, you can find it here.


  • I’m starting to love your content Bilal, it’s finally great to see an author whose articles are really tech-oriented. Keep up the good work.

  • Would rather like to stick with old methods of Windows. Every platform has its norms, what goes in Windows does not apply to Linux and vice versa.


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