I found one of the best application for windows a while ago: Scoop

It is a command-line installer for windows. There are couple other applications which are similiar, like Chocolatey, which I’ve tried and installed couple of applications with it but I never got to use it that much. I really don’t know why, I’m sure it is very capable package manager, but scoop seems easier and fits me nicely.

Scoop

Installation

Check Scoop homepage for up-to-date installation instructions. At the time of writing it was simply starting a powershell and running:

  iex (new-object net.webclient).downloadstring('https://get.scoop.sh')
  set-executionpolicy unrestricted -s cu

Search for an application

To check if an application is available for installation via scoop, search for it with:

  scoop search 7zip

Install applications

Simply install applications with

  scoop install 7zip

Update applications

To update scoop you just need to run:

  scoop update

To see which applications have new versions you can then run the status command

  scoop status

and it will give a list of those applications which have updates. So it is easy to keep your applications running the latest version. You can either update them one at a time, like:

  scoop update <app-name>

or all at once

  scoop update *

Automate installation of applications

You can use this to set up a new machine easily, for example if you change computer or if your collegues need the same applications on their machine. Simply create a powershell script with all the applications listed. Like:

# utils
scoop install 7zip curl git openssh coreutils

# Add extras bucket too scoop
scoop bucket add extras

# programming languages
scoop install ruby nodejs

# Add Java-bucket to scoop
scoop bucket add java

# java 8 & java 11 (AdoptOpenJDK)
scoop install adopt8-hotspot adopt11-hotspot

# IDE
scoop install eclipse-jee vscode vim emacs

You could save this as setup-apps.ps1 and then when you need to install the same apps on a new computer you could simple install scoop and run the script:

  .\setup-apps.ps1

and then just wait until the apps are installed.

Switch between versions

Some applications like Java SDK maybe you need multiple versions, like Java 8 and Java 11 and you need to switch between them. You can do this by running:

  scoop reset adopt8-hotspot

and it will set your java to version8 and same if you want to switch it back to to 11

  scoop reset adopt11-hotspot

Check documentation

If you find that the application you want to install with scoop isn’t available, you can write a manifest-file for it and make a pull request and maybe they will add it to the buckets. For more information about on how to do that and other details about Scoop check the documentation.