Click Free Application Deployment

With The Magic Of PowerShell and Chocolatey

Paul Broadwith
  • Paul Broadwith, Glasgow Scotland
  • 25+ years in IT in financial, government, manufacturing and services sectors
  • Lead Engineer on Boxstarter and cChoco DSC Resource
MVP Logo
Chocolatey Logo
Scottish PowerShell and DevOps User Group Logo
 
  • Understand what Chocolatey is;
  • Understand the difference between packages and installers;
  • Be able to create a package;
  • Learn how to work with installers that won‘t install silently;
  • Learn to use Pester to test your packages;
  • Learn what the Chocolatey Community Repository is;
  • Tips on how to keep your package continually updated;

Questions at the end. Plleeaassseeeee?

What Is Chocolatey?

To install PowerShell Core on Linux:

apt install -y powershell
yum install -y powershell
pacman -S powershell

To install PowerShell Core on Mac:

brew cask install powershell

To install PowerShell Core on Windows:

Next, Next, Next

What Is Chocolatey?

  • Chocolatey is the package manager for Windows
  • Created by Rob Reynolds (@ferventcoder)
  • First version released on 23 March 2011

Now Windows has:

choco install powershell-core -y

Chocolatey Logo

Chocolatey Prerequisites

  • Windows 7+ / Server 2003+
  • Windows PowerShell 2
  • .NET 4 (TLS 1.2 requires .NET 4.5)
  • No Nano Support (see GitHub issue #1371)

Fundamental Tenet Of Chocolatey

Chocolatey manages packages. Packages manage installers.

Chocolatey does not manage installers.

What Is A Chocolatey Package?

What is a Chocolatey package:

  • Special Zip file with a .nupkg extension;
  • Commonly called ‘nupkeg’ or ‘noo package’ due to file extension;
  • It contains metadata, PowerShell scripts and sometimes other files;
  • Builds on NuGet package framework while remaining compatible with v2 repositories;
 packagename.nuspec


chocolateyInstall.ps1


googlechrome.msi

What can a Chocolatey package do:

  • Chocolatey PowerShell;
  • PowerShell scripts install, upgrade and uninstall software;
  • Almost anything you can do in PowerShell you can do with a Chocolatey package but don’t use choco commands inside Chocolatey packages!
 chocolateyInstall.ps1


chocolateyBeforeModify.ps1


chocolateyUninstall.ps1

DEMO 1

Lets Look At Chocolatey Packages

Chocolatey Community Repository

Everything you wanted to know but were afraid to ask.

  • Repository is at chocolatey.org hosted by Chocolatey;
  • Chocolatey uses it as the default chocolatey package source;
  • Vast majority of packages created by volunteer maintainers;
  • Some vendors maintain their own packages;
  • Repository is for the many and not the few - use is monitored;
  • Licensing is important - does not have redistribution rights;

Chocolatey Community Repository

Monthly website stats as of November 2019:

  • 1.6 B requests;
  • 177 TB of data;
  • 1.8M unique visitors

Rate Limiting - 1 hour block

  • Downloads of Chocolatey Package: 5
  • Downloads of ANY OTHER Package: 20

Monthly Download Monitoring - fixed block

  • Tens of thousands of package downloads over a specific period

Push 
choco push mypackage.1.0.0.nupkg
  --api-key="'123456'"

Received
  • Package Validator
  • Package Verifier
  • Package Scanner
  • Human Moderator
Approved Monthly Package Verifier

Organizational Community Repository Use

  • Not recommended for direct use by organisations:
    • Reliability;
    • Trust;
    • Bandwidth;
    • Distribution rights;
  • Recommend you create package repository with Artifactory, Nexus or ProGet;
  • Disable Chocolatey Community Repository:
	choco source disable --name="'chocolatey'"

DEMO 2

Tips For Testing and Keeping Your Packages Continually Updated

Summary

  • We know what Chocolatey is;
  • We know how to create a package and how to use the template;
  • Learned how to deal with troublesome installers;
  • Use Pester to test our packages;
  • Learn what happens when you submit a package to the Chocolatey Community Repository;
  • What to use to keep your package continually updated;

Questions

https://blog.pauby.com
Paul Broadwith
@pauby
github.com/pauby
linkedin.com/in/paulbroadwith

pau.by/talks