First, there's the open-sourced version, which is completely free and can be customized and extended. There are a few different versions of Chocolatey.

With Chocolatey, there's no longer a need to run msiexec.exe or another installer executable directly from the command line. The beauty of Chocolatey is that with a unified CLI, it allows users to manage software regardless of the installer type (MSI, EXE, etc.) with the same commands. NuGet is a Microsoft-created package framework for the purposes of bundling code into “packages.” Chocolatey uses this same framework but then adds PowerShell as the means to add functionality (install, updating, uninstalling) packages.Ĭhocolatey is quite similar to YUM or apt-get, providing a unified interface to managing software. The main difference behind Chocolatey and a YUM or apt-get is the technologies that are behind Chocolatey: NuGet and PowerShell. The Chocolatey client software allows users to connect to software repositories, such as Chocolatey's community repository, as its main source of software, the same as YUM or apt-get. The basic functionality of Chocolatey is quite similar to YUM or apt-get, as it provides a unified interface to managing software. To understand the basic idea behind Chocolatey, you need only to peer over at the Linux operating system. With the advent of Chocolatey, Windows now has a solution to better manage and automate software on all of its operating systems. Automation is built around the idea of letting computers do the work based on logic without human intervention, creating simpler flows of processes. In DevOps, installing software with a GUI by clicking through buttons goes against the principle of automation. Windows software has traditionally been an experience focusing on a graphical user interface to accomplish installation.

One aspect of automation that's been lacking until recently is the use of modern package management in Windows, for instance, the ability to use specific software versions in configuration management code was once far from trivial. For years, Windows has been far behind Linux in terms of bringing DevOps tools to its platform.

Windows install chocolatey