Chocolatey

Chocolatey is a Windows package manager, which means 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 individual devices, having a list of packages installed is very helpful, which I'm maintaining in this post (see below).

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

Install

Open PowerShell in Admin mode

Set-ExecutionPolicy Bypass -Scope Process -Force; iex ((New-Object System.Net.WebClient).DownloadString('https://chocolatey.org/install.ps1'))

Initial set up

Chocolatey asks for confirmation before any installation; 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

Basic Choco commands

Commands Reference

Search for packages

Chocolatey seems to have a lot of the programs you may wish to install, but the package name is not always obvious. 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 it is easier to find the relevant package. https://chocolatey.org/packages

Choco installs

Here is the list of packages that I usually install. I'll aim to keep this list up to date so I have a reference of my installed packages as a gist.

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To check which packages are outdated but not perform any updates, run the following.

choco outdated

To upgrade these outdated packages you can either upgrade a single package.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, Chocolatey itself will need to be upgraded from time to time. The above commands will work, but for reference, here is the command to only upgrade Chocolatey.

choco upgrade chocolatey

Uninstall packages

choco uninstall <package>