Last month, my company got me a new laptop. I have very little choice in which one I get, and I have to reinstall a lot of software. So, what to do next?
Option one: download and install
This is something I see a lot of people do: make a list of the software they have. Browse to the website of this toolset, download it, and install it. And repeat. This works, but it is very tedious.
Option two: automate it
As the great Rob Sewell keeps telling the community, everything you do more than once, automate it. And for this installing party, there is an option to automate by using Chocolatey.
You can think of this as a tool for reaching your Desired State Configuration (DSC). This is something enterprises also use to quickly build their digital workspace.
The only thing you need to do is find out which software you’re using and look for it in the Chocolatey repository. If it’s there, you can run the command to install the software and do something more useful (like catching up with a coworker at the coffee machine) while it installs.
Yes, you do need to complete the configuration later on, but the basics are in place for you.
Here are my current working commands. Run them in Administrator mode in PowerShell 7, and you should be good to go.
Set-ExecutionPolicy Bypass -Scope Process -Force; [System.Net.ServicePointManager]::SecurityProtocol = [System.Net.ServicePointManager]::SecurityProtocol -bor 3072; iex ((New-Object System.Net.WebClient).DownloadString('https://community.chocolatey.org/install.ps1'))
choco install firefox -y
choco install greenshot -y
choco install git -y
choco install 1password -y
choco install vscode -y
choco install 7zip -y
choco install anaconda3 -y
choco install everything -y
choco install drawio -y
choco install FileZilla -y
choco install SoapUI -y
choco install Postman -y
choco install obs -y
choco install slack -y
choco install treesizefree -y
choco install azurestorageexplorer -y
I’m also using a number of tools that are not (yet) supported, such as OhMyPosh, Clickshare, Focusrite, GitHub Desktop, Notepad++, notepad++, whatsapp and SSMS. All of these need more manual input to download and install. You can find all supported packages via this link.
Youre a smart person, so you’ll never just run code you’ve found on the internet. So you first check out the Chocolatey website before you run it. Right? Good!
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