Announced at the Build 2020 developer conference, a Windows Package Manager is a comprehensive package manager solution for developers and IT admins on Windows operating system.
Windows Package Manager consists of a command line tool and set of services for installing applications on Windows 10.
If you are an IT admin looking to automate the process of install, upgrade, remove and configure a set of applications on a Windows 10 PC, then you should try the Windows Package Manager, winget.
You can access winget via the Windows Terminal, PowerShell, or the Command Prompt.
A package manager is a system or set of tools used to automate installing, upgrading, configuring and using software. Most package managers are designed for discovering and installing developer tools.
winget features
The following commands and options are available:
- install Installs the given application
- show Shows info about an application
- source Manage sources of applications
- search Find and show basic info of apps
- hash Helper to hash installer files
- validate Validates a manifest file
- –help Provides command line help
- –info Provides addition data, helpful for troubleshooting
- –version Provides the version of the client
How to download and install winget
If you are running the Windows 10 May 2020 update, you may already have the winget package manager installed on your PC.
To verify, run the following command:
winget --versionIf you see something like v0.1.41331 Preview, then you do not need to do anything extra.
However, for the sake of the rest of the users, we will be going through the rest of the tutorial.
Since the winget package manager has been made open source, head on over to the GitHub repository Winget releases page and download the file marked in the image below.
Once the file is downloaded, browse to the file and double click to run. You will see something like this.
Click on UPDATE button to update the inbuilt app installer.
When the process finishes, open a command prompt window and run the following command. Now the version v0.1.41331 Preview should show up.
winget --version
In the follow up tutorial, we will be taking a look at how to discover and install apps in bulk on Windows 10 using the command line tool.
