How to install Chocolatey/Choco (Package Manager) in Windows?

What Is Chocolatey?

It is kind of time-consuming to install a program. You need to search for the program you want, download, and then manually install the software. During this process, some unwanted packages will be bundled.

If you want to jump these tedious steps, the you can try Chocolatey – a machine-level, command-line package manager and installer for software on Microsoft Windows. Chocolatey allows you to discover, install, upgrade, remove and configure applications on Windows. It has many features that worth trying.

1. It is easy to install software from a command line and that can save your much time.
2. It can install multiple programs at once.
3. There are over 370 programs allowed to be installed.
4. Chocolatey works with over 20 installer technologies for Windows.
5. It can run scripts, provide server management, centralized reporting, custom configuration, and more.

How to Install Chocolatey on Windows?

To install Chocolatey on Windows, you need to meet the following requirements first.

• PowerShell v2+
• .NET Framework 4 or later
• Windows 7 or later/Windows Server 2003 or later
• Stable Internet connection

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Then you can follow the next steps to install Chocolatey packages.

Step 1: Run PowerShell or CMD as an administrator on your Windows.

Step 2: Then please input the following command and press Enter to check for the execution policy.

Get-ExecutionPolicy

Step 3: If it shows you Restricted, please run the following command to switch it to allsigned.

Set-ExecutionPolicy AllSigned

Step 4: Once the Execution policy is set, please paste the following command into the Command prompt and press Enter to install Chocolatey on your Windows computer.

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’))

Step 5: If it asks you to choose Yes or No, please input Y and press Enter.

Then Chocolatey packages have been installed and you can use it to install what you want via the choco command.

How to Use Chocolatey on Windows?

Here, we will give you some examples to use Chocolatey.

1. If you want to install a specific program, such as Google Chrome Browser, you can input the following command.

choco install <package_name>

such as, choco install chrome

2. If you want to update a program, you can input the following command.

choco upgrade < package_name >

such as, choco upgrade chrome

3. If you want to update all programs, you can input the following command.

choco upgrade all

4. If you want to search the program you would like to install, you can input the following command.

choco search < package_name >

such as, choco search chrome

5. If you want to uninstall a program, you can input the following command.

choco uninstall < package_name >

6. If you need to check more choco commands and parameters, you can input the following command and the available commands will show you.

choco /?

Bottom Line:

This article has helped you to better understand what Chocolatey is and you can follow the steps to install it for using on Windows. This tool may help you install software in a more convenient way. Hope this article can be useful for you.