Installing and updating applications. The boring part of any admins day. Constantly hunting for the latest patches and updates. And when you deploy a new image, always a deep sigh as you hunt down installers. Sure, you could download the installers to a network share, but you know for a fact as soon as you download them they are going to be out of date. Here’s how you get started.
- Open an Admin PowerShell window.
- Paste this command into the window.
- 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’))
- Exit PowerShell and then reopen it.
That’s it you are done installing it, easiest package deployment install process ever. You now can execute install commands for any of the programs that you want to deploy. The entire library is accessible here. https://community.chocolatey.org/packages To install a package you just execute the following PowerShell command. And you can install multiple apps at the same time by just separating the package names with a space.
choco install <package name> -y
To update all the choco packages installed, just execute the following PowerShell command. Or use the second command to update just a particular package.
choco upgrade all -y
choco upgrade <package name> -y
My personal favorite installs are here. These are the names I use to install the packages. But checkout the actual site so you can see what command line options are available for each of them.
- 7zip.install
- Firefox
- fslogix
- GoogleChrome
- keepass.install
- laps
- microsoft-edge
- notepadplusplus.install
- onenote
- putty.install
- treesizefree
- vnc-viewer
- winscp
You also can host your own package repository if you don’t want to trust internet people. I do recommend this if you are looking to use this on more than just your non-persistent images as they will throttle you if you have hundreds of machines pulling from the public repository.