A quick recap on Chocolatey, a package manager for Windows
Setting up a new laptop or virtual machine with the software and tooling might be a challenging and extremely boring routine. If you want to streamline installation experience, you might consider looking into the Chocolatey package manager. It takes away the complexity of software downloads, installation, and upgrades so you can have your coffee or focus on other tasks.
Install Chocolatey
Getting Chocolatey installed is super-easy. It comes with cmd.exe and PowerShell versions. Refer to the official installation guide for more details or fire up the following in your console:
# via cmd
@"%SystemRoot%\System32\WindowsPowerShell\v1.0\powershell.exe" -NoProfile -InputFormat None -ExecutionPolicy Bypass -Command "iex ((New-Object System.Net.WebClient).DownloadString('https://chocolatey.org/install.ps1'))" && SET "PATH=%PATH%;%ALLUSERSPROFILE%\chocolatey\bin" # via PowerShell
Set-ExecutionPolicy Bypass -Scope Process -Force; iex ((New-Object System.Net.WebClient).DownloadString('https://chocolatey.org/install.ps1'))
Explore Chocolatey packages
Once done, you can install new software with the help of a few commands. Chocolatey is built on top of NuGet so that all packages are available in Chocolatey Gallery. You can find nearly every software package there:
Let see a bare developer setup via Chocolatey lenses. We need recent browsers, git, Cmder, Visual Studio Code, and maybe curl/wget? Here we go:
choco install -y googlechrome
choco install -y firefoxchoco install -y cmder
choco install -y nugetpackageexplorerchoco install -y gitchoco install -y wget
choco install -y curlchoco install -y 7zip
choco install -y visualstudiocode
A broader setup might look as following:
choco install -y googlechrome
choco install -y firefoxchoco install -y adobereader
choco install -y kindlechoco install -y skype
choco install -y spotifychoco install -y slack
choco install -y viberchoco install -y cmder
choco install -y rdcman
choco install -y mremotengchoco install -y paint.net
choco install -y nugetpackageexplorerchoco install -y dd
choco install -y fciv
choco install -y putty
choco install -y nanochoco install -y git
choco install -y svn
choco install -y githubchoco install -y wget
choco install -y curlchoco install -y 7zip
choco install -y winrar
choco install -y sysinternalschoco install -y awscli
choco install -y awstools.powershell
choco install -y azure-clichoco install -y windowsazurepowershell
choco install -y azcopy
choco install -y azurestorageexplorerchoco install -y visualstudiocode
choco install -y cshellchoco install -y ruby
choco install -y nodejs
choco install -y python
choco install -y jre8choco install -y dotnet4.6
choco install -y dotnet3.5
choco install -y dogtail.dotnet3.5sp1choco install -y golang
choco install -y liteidechoco install -y evernote
choco install -y xmindchoco install -y packer
choco install -y vagrant
choco install -y virtualbox --version 5.1.22choco install -y vlc
For what the Chocolatey does, it is worth exploring further. Codified setup can be stored in source control, your personal setups can be easily managed in https://gist.github.com, and then infrastructure automation becomes much easier.
In our projects, we use Chocolatey in a variety of cases including baking Windows and SharePoint images with packer to produce reusable vagrant boxes.
Further reading
Checkout how other people use Chocolatey and share your experience as well.
• https://chocolatey.org
• https://chocolatey.org/packages
• https://medium.com/@jiayu./thoughts-on-chocolatey-6d2c69b28727
• https://medium.com/@jrcharney/the-list-of-windows-software-you-should-be-using-65aaf387bbdf
