Chocolatey

I lately stumpled upon „Chocolatey“, that is according to its developers, „kind of like apt-get, but for Windows“. Chocolatey makes use of the Windows powershell and is very easy to use. It is worth to get more into it.  I used it so far to automate the installation of Vagrant based Windows Virtual machines and to keep my own system up to date.

To install Chocolatey, one just need to call the following statement at a command prompt:

@powershell -NoProfile -ExecutionPolicy Bypass -Command "iex ((new-object net.webclient).DownloadString('https://chocolatey.org/install.ps1'))" && SET PATH=%PATH%;%ALLUSERSPROFILE%\chocolatey\bin

When installed, you can install for instance the Chrome browser by:

choco install googlechrome -y

It is also possible to install Chrome extensions, like KeePassHttp, Flashplayer or Adblock via the CLI. So no need to install all week a new version of your Flashplayer…

In fact, I amusing Chocolatey starting from now on to keep my Windows machine updated. With a simple choco upgrade all you are done with your updates. There are currently almost 3000 packages available. So you can keep your browsers, git, Flash Player, Notepad++, 7Zip, Java Runtime, Adobe Reader just to mention a few all updated by invoking one single command.

So summarize: It is good to see, that Windows has gotten its own apt-get  now 🙂