Chocolatey Is Quite Yummy

When it comes to package management, Windows has historically been far behind Linux. With Chocolatey, Windows users can now get a taste of something “yummy.”

In the world of Linux, a user has yum and apt-get, two great package managers that easily enable installation of software. For instance, to install PostgreSQL (and all of its dependency packages) you can run yum install postgresql.x86_64. It is fast and simple.

What would be the default method to install software on Windows? Go to a website, download the installer, double-click the exe file, click “next” 20 times and then click “finish”. It’s just one command on Linux versus a bunch of manual steps on Windows.

Windows has been long overdue for a package management system that can mirror something like yum or apt-get and finally the wait is over. Chocolatey, the creation of Rob Reynolds, a former Puppet software engineer is rapidly gaining a following because it fills this very void. With Chocolatey, if a user wants to install Firefox they can open a command prompt or PowerShell and run choco install firefox.

Bam that’s it. Software installed.

Not only has Chocolatey solved the problem of simplifying package management in Windows via the command-line, but it also hosts thousands of packages in its public repository, which right now holds 5,256 unique packages. In my experience, if you are looking to install any given piece of software on Windows, chances are

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