Chocolatey: The Missing Package Manager for Windows

If you’re a macOS user, or followed most tutorials here on FSM, you’ve probably noticed we mention Homebrew a lot. Homebrew is a package manager for macOS ( and Linux ) that allows you to quickly install and manage apps.

Let’s say you want to install Firefox. Normally you will do a web search for Firefox, click on the Mozilla link, click the download button, wait for the .dmg to download, open the dmg, and drag the app to /Applications folder. With Homebrew, all you have to do is type brew cask install firefox in the terminal. Want to install Firefox ESR or Nightly, no problem just replace firefox with firefox-esr or firefox-nightly in the command above. That’s pretty darn neat.

So macOS users have Homebrew, Linux distros all come with their own package manager ( and Homebrew, however I’m not sure how many people are using it on Linux ). What about Windows?

Windows user have Chocolatey. A package manager similar to Homebrew, that we’ve mentioned in a few tutorials here on FSM. If you’ve never heard of Chocolatey or you’re not using it yet, you’re missing out. So let’s jump right in and see how to install and use Chocolatey.

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1. Right click on the start menu and choose Windows PowerShell (Admin)

 

2. Click Yes

 

3. Copy-paste this, into PowerShell 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')) .

 

4. Once installed, close PoweShell and re-open it to install packages.

5. To install a application, you need to type choco install app_name. Let’s install Firefox. To do that, I need to run choco install firefox.

 

5.1 At the prompt choose Y to install.

 

6. That’s it. Firefox is now installed.

 

To install multiple apps at once and also bypass the Yes prompt you can run choco install app_name app_name -y. For example, let’s say you want to install Firefox, Spotify and Notepad++. You will need to run choco install firefox spotify notepadplusplus -y.

NOTE: the -y argument also works if you install a single app.

 

To update chocolatey and all installed apps all you have to do is run choco update all -y

 

To uninstall an app you can either go through the usual Windows app uninstalling process or run choco uninstall app_name

For more info and to search for a list of available apps, visit the official website.