winget

winget is a command line package manager for Windows 10, open-sourced under the MIT License. Roughly equivalent to apt or brew. If you already know and love Chocolatey, you’re fine. Stick with that for now. winget shows promise though.

The other night I installed Strawberry Perl and played with Image::ExifTool a tiny bit.

Yesterday I successfully installed Emacs and started doing real work writing Perl code with it.

Exciting!

How do I get Winget?

winget is still in preview. You can get it as part of the Windows Insider program, like me. Slow Ring should be fine. If you don’t feel like taking the risk on a preview release of Windows, you can grab it from the winget-cli repository.

Finding and installing stuff with winget

One goal when in Windows is to use Windows, and not just spend all day hiding in WSL. If I want to use Windows, I need Perl.

Hey, I’ll allow myself a few crutches here and there.

PS > winget search perl
Name            Id                            Version  Matched
----------------------------------------------------------------
Strawberry Perl StrawberryPerl.StrawberryPerl 5.30.2.1
Xampp           ApacheFriends.Xampp           7.4.6    Tag: Perl

Ooh, XAMPP. I haven’t messed with that in years.

But no I’m just here for Perl today. Strawberry Perl is an excellent Perl setup for Windows. Provides all the core stuff, a bunch of useful extras, and the tools you need to install additional libraries.

winget show displays additional details about a package.

PS > winget show StrawberryPerl
Found Strawberry Perl [StrawberryPerl.StrawberryPerl]
Version: 5.30.2.1
Publisher: strawberryperl.com project
Description: Strawberry Perl is a perl environment for MS Windows containing all you need to run and develop perl
applications. It is designed to be as close as possible to perl environment on UNIX systems.
Homepage: http://strawberryperl.com/
License: Perl.org
Installer:
  SHA256: 2365e89623b496ca530443a362e765f3e8de9daa744b07924b17ae7aa0b06002
  Download Url: http://strawberryperl.com/download/5.30.2.1/strawberry-perl-5.30.2.1-32bit.msi
  Type: Msi

Yep, that’s what I want.

PS > winget install StrawberryPerl

Things do get automatically added to your path, but not right away. Somebody more familiar with Windows probably knows what to do. Me? When it doesn’t catch right away I log out and back in. That always does the trick.

PS > perl --version
This is perl 5, version 30, subversion 2 (v5.30.2) built for MSWin32-x86-multi-thread-64int

Copyright 1987-2020, Larry Wall

Perl may be copied only under the terms of either the Artistic License or the
GNU General Public License, which may be found in the Perl 5 source kit.

Complete documentation for Perl, including FAQ lists, should be found on
this system using "man perl" or "perldoc perl".  If you have access to the
Internet, point your browser at http://www.perl.org/, the Perl Home Page.

Now what about all the other package manger functionality?

What about updating, listing, uninstalling, etc?

Um. Well. I mentioned winget is in preview, right? Check the development roadmap.