Installing and using a 3rd party package manager

[avatar user="Jamie Poindexter" size="thumbnail" align="left" /] byJamie Poindexter|Sep 13, 2022|Jamie's Tech Corner,Our blogNormally when you need to install a program you would go to the vendors website and download the package and install it. If you need to do this for many computers that get old quick. Updating those apps as well can be a pain unless the program supports automatic updates. Chocolatey is a 3^rd party package manager that runs through PowerShell/CLI and lets you install a large number of programs quickly and even easier to update them in the future.First you need to open PowerShell by clicking on start and search for PowerShell

Once the PowerShell window opens we need to make some adjustments to the execution policy. Run the following command:

Now we can run the install command for Chocolatey:Set-ExecutionPolicy Bypass -Scope Process -Force; [System.Net.ServicePointManager]::SecurityProtocol = [System.Net.ServicePointManager]::SecurityProtocol -bor 3072; iex ((New-Object System.Net.WebClient).DownloadString('https://community.chocolatey.org/install.ps1'))

As noted in the command output you will need to close and reopen PowerShell once the installation is done. To check if its installed correctly run this command:ChocoIt should return the version of Chocolatey installed

Now we are ready to test it out and install our first application. Let’s say you want to install 7Zip. Here I the command you would run:Choco install 7zip

As you can see its now installed

If you need to update an application, you simply replace the “install” with “upgrade”. Choco will check the repository for an updated version and install if found.

If you are unsure if an application is available for install you can use the Choco find command to search the repo

Here are some of the other switches you can use along with the choco command

If you are using a RMM software such as Automate this tool can vastly improve the installation of common software packages and keeping them updated.