Chocolatey is a Linux-apt-get-like Packet Manager for Windows that uses PowerShell. Software you’ve installed using Chocolatey can easily be upgraded at once by just starting a command like “choco upgrade all”.
Actually this is the coolest and easiest way to get control of all the Flash, Java, Acrobat and all other thousand tools on your computer.
Do I have to reinstall all my Tools?
No. Just install everything again with choco over your actual setup. This works great and is a good way to start with Chocolatey.
So tell me how
To eat the chocolate, start an elevated cmd.exe prompt and run this command (copy-paste):
@powershell -NoProfile -ExecutionPolicy Bypass -Command "iex ((new-object net.webclient).DownloadString('https://chocolatey.org/install.ps1'))" && SET PATH=%PATH%;%ALLUSERSPROFILE%\chocolatey\bin
// If you want to be sure, this command is from here: http://www.chocolatey.org
Important: choco only works in elevated promts, never try to run without elevation. But you can run choco in cmd.exe as well as powershell.exe; I recommend to use powershell because choco is based on PowerShell.
Tweaks
One important tweak is to disable the confirmation prompt. Each time you install something, choco asks for confirmation. This can get painful if you’d like to upgrade for example 20 packages at once.
To disable the prompt, run this command:
choco feature enable -n allowGlobalConfirmation
Let’s install
Now you can use choco with this parameters.
choco -? # help choco install <paket> # install choco remove <paket> # uninstall choco list <suchbegriff> # search for a packet choco upgrade all # upgrades all installed packages choco list -l # shows locally installed choco packages
My favorites
Here’s my package list for all computers.
choco install 7zip AdobeAIR altap-salamander cdburnerxp GoogleChrome dropbox firefox flashplayerplugin jre8 keepass mRemoteNG notepadplusplus Silverlight skype teamviewer vlc
Other packages, that might interest you:
cdburnerxp classic-shell Firefox handbrake IrfanView iTunes lastpass thunderbird Gpg4win
And there are a lot more. Just search for it using “choco list <whatever>”.