Look Into Chocolatey

Just a suggestion, but I’d say you should look into Chocolatey. Let me explain why.

Sabbatical

For those who don’t know I was recently on a six-week sabbatical from work (thank you Redgate) and I tacked a week of vacation to that. While I did clean out email during that time (can you imagine coming back to seven weeks worth… <shudder>), I didn’t do software updates of any kind.

In the meantime, Docker was updated. VSCode, SSMS, a whole slew of others. Not to mention, the busy little beavers at Redgate released umpty-million updates. My machine needed love, so I typed the following:

choco upgrade all -y

Then I went to get some coffee. Why? Because all that software that was out of date, it was getting updated, automatically by Chocolatey.

Chocolatey, What Is It?

Chocolatey, as it says on the web site, is a package manager for Windows. But what does that mean? Basically, a package manager is a central place to install, upgrade and remove software. You get a database of the software you have installed, then it can help you to manage your software. Package managers are built into most operating systems. For example, apt or yum on a Linux box. However, not Windows. That’s where Chocolatey comes in.

Installing Chocolatey puts a package manager on Windows. Then you can do stuff like this:

choco install brave

That one command will download the Brave web browser and run the install for you, cleaning up behind itself.

WHOOP!

Yeah, it’s that easy.

And you don’t have to guess at which packages, pieces of software, are available. There’s a list. As of this writing, 9,337 different installations you can run.

Conclusion

So much of what we do is hard. If we can make something easy, heck yeah, sign me up. Chocolatey really makes a difference. I figured I’d share this with you since I haven’t seen as many people talking about it recently, yet, I know, tons of people use it all the time. We’re just quietly having an easier time than our peers.

So please, take a look at Chocolatey if you haven’t already. It does make a lot of things easier.

Gotta run, system needs a reboot.

UPDATE: I may have known this (tickle at the back of my brain), but I was informed there is a native Windows package manager: winget. Also worth checking out. Thanks Buck!