If you've followed me for a while you'll know that I am fan of Chocolatey, I use it to help install packages in bulk or keep them update to without much faff. Whenever I share my love for Chocolatey people ALWAYS ask why I don't use WinGet. And to be honest, I've not looked at it properly, but today is the day. Today I am going to look at installing it on my machine and seeing what it can do.
Windows Package Manager was announced at Build in May 2020. And version 1.0 was released in May 2021.
Install Options
There are a couple of options for getting Windows Package Manager installed on your machine. As it's open source, you can clone, build, run deploy from the source code which is in the GitHub repository if you want to go down that route.
The other options for those that aren't comfortable with that are via the Windows Store or actually downloading the Release file from GitHub.
I went with downloading the latest release file from https://github.com/microsoft/winget-cli/releases If you are running Windows 10 find the latest .appxbundle file, download that and install it.
There are some considerations you need to remember when trying to install the Windows Package Manager tool, to get the full picture and latest guidance you can head over here.
Installation
I've downloaded the latest .appxbundle file, to install just double click and go through the install wizard are prompted. It should be fairly quick.
To check the install has happened, launch PowerShell or Command Prompt shell and type in
winget --version
What packages can be installed by WinGet?
There is a long list of package that can be installed with WinGet, if you type in the command
winget search
It will take you through the list, and it's quite extensive!
You can narrow that search down by issuing a command such as:
winget search vlc
This shows me the VLC packages that I can install via WinGet. You can search for anything that you want, VLC, PowerShell, Azure, a whole lot of things. 😊
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