You’ve probably seen a couple of my blog posts on how to use Chocolatey and Boxstarter in Enterprise environments. I even have Julien Stanojevic doing a session at my virtual expo 2015 called “Automating Citrix Builds Using Chocolatey & BoxStarter”. Check the full agenda and register here.
In todays post I’m going to show you how easy Chocolatey is and how you can use it to save a ton of time! That beeing when reinstalling your own computers or fixing it for friends and family.
At Citrix Synergy 2015 I got myself a Dell XPS13 Ultrabook Computer. So instead of going the old-school way of downloading and installing software from the various vendors websites I went the new-school way and used Chocolatey.
You see, a Chocolatey package will download the latest version and install it unattended automatically.
So if I want to install LibreOffice you just run the following command:
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choco install -y libreoffice |
Since most of my software are installed this way, I can easily run a Powershell script and Automatically Generating a Chocolatey Install Script.
Then simply copy and replace Choco Install with Choco Install -y and you got yourself a script to install all your required software.
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choco install -y 7zip choco install -y autohotkey.portable choco install -y classic-shell choco install -y CloudBerryExplorer.S3 choco install -y cutepdf choco install -y DotNet4.5 choco install -y dropbox choco install -y filezilla choco install -y Firefox choco install -y Ghostscript choco install -y Ghostscript.app choco install -y GoogleChrome choco install -y javaruntime choco install -y jre8 choco install -y lastpass choco install -y notepadplusplus choco install -y notepadplusplus.install choco install -y NugetPackageExplorer choco install -y paint.net choco install -y putty choco install -y putty.portable choco install -y rdcman choco install -y rdm choco install -y Silverlight choco install -y skype choco install -y snagit choco install -y sumatrapdf choco install -y sumatrapdf.commandline choco install -y winscp |
You get the picture?
Yesterday I installed Windows 10 bare-metal on one of my Mac Minis. The installation on SSD was super fast and then I just needed to install the Boot Camp drivers to get online.
Being online I grabbed the script above and started the automated installation of my prefered software. Some software needs to be installed manually simply because they don’t exist in the Chocolatey library, but the 80/20 rule applies. Back to beers and family!
So are you still going to do it the old-school way or do you want to enter the new-school way? Please share your thoughts in the comments below.