Choco Windows

 

Chocolatey is a windows package manager meaning software can be installed through shell commands. This enables software to be installed, upgraded and uninstalled via scripts.

I’ve started to try using Chocolatey across my different devices in an effort to keep them in sync with the different programs. Although the commands must be run on the individual devices, it’s very helpful to have a list of packages installed which I’m maintaining in this post (see below).

Next time I set up a machine I’ll just need to follow the below instructions and let Chocolatey do much of the heavy lifting.

Initial set up

Chocolatey asks for confirmation before any install, although sensible this can become tiresome. To avoid this you can set a -y flag on every choco install command or set the following global chocolatey flag to make life easier.

choco feature enable -n allowGlobalConfirmation

Search for packages

Chocolatey seems to have a lot of the programs you may wish to install but it’s not always obvious what the package name is. This is where the search command comes in.

choco search <package>

I’ve recently started to use the package search on the website instead as easier to find the relevant package. https://chocolatey.org/packages

Choco installs

Here is my list of packages that I usually install. I’ll be aiming to keep this list up to date so I’ve a reference of my installed packages as a gist.

choco install 7zip

choco install autohotkey

choco install curl

choco install nodejs

choco install openssh --pre

You can also see what packages you have installed with

choco list --localonly

Upgrade installed package versions

To check which packages are outdated but not perform any updates, run the following.

choco outdated

To upgrade these outdated packages you can either upgrade a single package. NOTE: upgrade is the correct command here, update is being depreciated in version 1.0

choco upgrade <package>

or upgrade them all in a single command

choco upgrade all

Upgrade Chocolatey itself

Inevitably from time to time Chocolatey itself will need to be upgraded. The above commands will work but for reference, here is the command to only upgrade Chocolatey.

choco upgrade chocolatey

Uninstall packages

choco uninstall <package>

 

https://richardballard.co.uk/chocolatey/