Most Common Winget commands

Winget is a Windows package manager supported by Microsoft. Functionally, it's similar to https://chocolatey.org, for which I published a list of most common commands in the past.

There are a handful of ways to install winget. Hopefully this will be built-in at some point.

The project is on GitHub, and so my preferred way to install for now is to simply get it from the Releases page. Just download and install the Microsoft.DesktopAppInstaller_8wekyb3d8bbwe.appxbundle file.

You can browse the repo with packages at github.com/microsoft/winget-pkgs. Look in the manifests directory, and then by the first letter of the publisher or project.

I like to keep a list of packages that I use and install regularly, which allows me to very quickly get a machine up and running the way I like it, and requires very minimal effort to keep up to date. But I don't have to mess around with it too often, and so I never seem to remember the commands to run.

Here, then, is a handy reference of the commands I use most frequently:

• Go to website: start https://aka.ms/winget
• What's installed: winget list
• Search for a package: winget search PACKAGE
• Install package: winget install PACKAGE
• Install package, no prompts: winget install PACKAGE --silent
• Update package: winget upgrade PACKAGE
• Update all packages: winget upgrade --all
• Uninstall package: winget uninstall PACKAGE
• Get package details: winget show PACKAGE

If you're using winget to automate VM or container setups for example, consider that many commands allow you to redirect logs with , which is handy if something goes wrong.

Happy package management!

Tags:  checklist

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