Magic Chocolatey: apt-get and yum for Windows

Today I will tell you about magic. And this magic can change the life of the Windows system administrator once and for all.

Nowadays there are fewer and fewer people who have not installed software in the Linux environment at least once. It's incredibly simple: to install midnight commander (mc), in the RH environment (RedHat Enterprise, CentOS, Fedora, etc.) we just need a couple of “magic” commands:

# yum install mc 

The package manager yum will make sure that the latest version of mc is installed, as well as the dependencies of the package, if any. But what to do if Windows is at our disposal, and we want something like that? Right, go to Linux or read on!
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Under my “guardianship” there is a heterogeneous network of Windows and Linux machines (easier to say, a zoo), and for about two years now I have been using Chocolatey to install software under Win *. Chocolatey ( chocolatey.org , github.com/chocolatey ) is a package management system, much like apt-get or yum, but only for Windows.

On Habré already touched the theme Chocolatey in the context of the developer, today I want to look at this wonderful tool from the point of view of the system administrator. Chocolatey works on the basis of NuGet technology (it is actively used by software developers under Windows), and the main feature of Chocolatey is that the packages most often do not contain installation files (setup.msi, setup.exe, etc ...). It works as follows: the package contains a script installer for powershell, which downloads and installs the correct version of the installation file from the right place on the Internet, and you just have to enjoy the ease of installation.

Chocolatey installation

Before being able to use Chocolate Chocolate magic, we need to install its core. To do this, run the command line:

 @powershell -NoProfile -ExecutionPolicy unrestricted -Command "iex ((new-object net.webclient).DownloadString('https://chocolatey.org/install.ps1'))" && SET PATH=%PATH%;%systemdrive%\chocolatey\bin 

This command will download and run the main installation script for chocolatey.org/install.ps1 , as well as set the required environment variables. Now that we have everything we need, let's test the package management system and install Nodepad ++. Just run the following command:

 cinst notepadplusplus 

What other packages are there and where do they come from?

Like NuGet, Chocolatey has an impressive list of packages, which is located in the repository, also known as the package library . Here are just some of them:


Packages are added every day, because anyone can add their pack on chocolatey.org, the main thing is that it meets the requirements .

How it works?

I would like to take a closer look at the contents of the Chocolatey packages using the example of logstash , which I created specifically for deploying the logstash agent on a Windows server:

 \logstash \tools chocolateyInstall.ps1 logstash.nuspec 

Here you can see that there are only 2 files in the package: logstash.nuspec and chocolateyInstall.ps1.


In this file it will be interesting to parse the dependencies section, in which we indicate that our package requires 3 other packages of certain versions, namely javaruntime , NSSM (allows you to install our .jar file as a Windows service), as well as Chocolatey of a certain version. If any of the required packages is missing, or its version does not match the required one, the dependency system will resolve the situation and lead everything to the required form. It should be noted that nuget is used to indicate versions.

Application:

Many admins probably ran to test the functionality - it’s right, because there’s nothing difficult to use with Chocolatey - this is what Chocolatey’s sweetness is about. Nevertheless, I would like to suggest several scenarios for using this package manager for Windows.

Cmd and Powershell scripts

We all use the simplest scripts in our work, and chocolatey is perfectly integrated into this process. The simplest script for a regular client machine might look like this:

 cinst flashplayerplugin cinst flashplayeractivex cinst notepadplusplus cinst sublimetext2 cinst 7zip cinst GoogleChrome cinst javaruntime cinst Firefox cinst flashplayerplugin cinst adobereader cinst ccleaner cinst sysinternals cinst putty cinst filezilla cinst dropbox cinst skype cinst paint.net cinst virtualbox cinst DotNet4.5 cinst Wget cinst ConEmu cinst libreoffice cinst PDFCreator cinst teamviewer cinst wuinstall.run 

Imagine how much time it saves you?

Puppet

I use Puppet to manage the configuration of my infrastructure, which saves me a lot of time and nerves. Puppet has a wonderful concept of resources, as well as a declarative style, which in a compartment helps to think abstractly, at the level “Which program should be on a particular server”, and not at the level “Which commands should I run on Windows and which ones on Linux ". For Puppet, there is a Chocolatey provider that allows us to do the following:

 package { "7zip" : ensure => installed, } 

or

 package { "notepadplusplus" : ensure => 1.0, } 

Puppet and Chocolatey will take care of the rest. Believe me, it is much more convenient than installing from the msi file, which you need somewhere else, and also to make sure that when you update the version (which still needs to be done), the old versions are also preserved and nothing will break.

Chocolatey and Desktop

I propose to consider two ways to use Chocolatey for the administration of workstations.



If anyone is interested, I can tell in detail (in the form of a separate post) how to create my package and how to download it to the chocolatey.org repository, and how I taught Windows to install all updates without my participation (with reboots and licenses), I update the maxmind.dat database automatically, as I use logstash and much more, and all this is not without the help of chocolatey and puppet!

In conclusion, I would say that in my opinion, the idea of ​​a decentralized package management system for Windows and its implementation is another way to make sure that today opensource and the discovery of technology is no less qualitative and applicable to the realities of system administration. Closed code is becoming less and less the market advantage of a community / company, while implementation and support play a huge role. Imagine that a decade ago, an open project created by one person could create such a resonance in wide circles, and even Windows circles - is unrealistic, but today Chocolatey is another chance to plunge into the opensource community and see the open possibility to contribute to the general idea .

For any errors and inaccuracies, please indicate in the comments, I will gladly correct and supplement the material.

And finally, a short survey: