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Thursday, September 10, 2020

Windows Application setup - using chocolatey

 


 

Today I am using Chocolatey to install the basic every day apps I use on my windows devops desktop
Chocolatey is a package manager for windows, that works in the same fashion as brew does for MacOS. It is a pretty lightweight set of powershell commands and uses pre-compiled packages for Windows. It also works for older versions of windows, so if you are hanging onto that Windows 7 installation, this should help.

First we want to install Chocolatey itself, and that is done within powershell. 
You want to run powershell 'As Administrator' so that you have privileged access. 
The next set is to check that you are able to run the signed code,

Get-ExecutionPolicy

If the above command returns "Restricted" run

https://youtu.be/xn5-1fbiTRY

This will allow the running of all signed code. 

Now we are able to install Chocolatey, and to do that, we run the command

Set-ExecutionPolicy Bypass -Scope Process -Force; [System.Net.ServicePointManager]::SecurityProtocol = [System.Net.ServicePointManager]::SecurityProtocol -bor 3072; iex ((New-Object System.Net.WebClient).DownloadString('https://chocolatey.org/install.ps1'))

Now we can install the apps. 
To install an application, you can use the following command

choco install vscode
 
 
The apps i am installing are:

Using Chocolatey allows you to install the apps from just the powershell prompt and makes it a bit simpler to use.
You can also stack the apps instead of installing one by one,
choco install git python awscli

This is a huge time saver as well since it goes directly from one app to the next. 

 

Overall I think chocolatey is a great resource for managing application installs on stand alone workstation or servers.  I have not used it aside from "one off" instances so I cannot give it any type of valid input there. 

 

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