How to install Windows Package Manager

Windows package Manager, commonly known as winget is a free and open-source package management utility for Microsoft Windows 10 and above. It is a simple and powerful command-line utility that allows you to install, update, and uninstall windows applications.

If you are familiar with Linux package managers, think of winget as the apt or yum for the Windows OS.

In this tutorial, you will discover how you can install and setup winget on your machine in very easy steps.

Requirements

To follow along with this guide, you will need:

1. An installed version of Windows 10 and above.
2. Privileges to install and make changes to the system
3. An active network connection.

With the above requirements met, we can proceed.

Installing Winget from Microsoft Store

The first and most common method to get winget running on your machine is via the Microsoft Store.

Click on the Windows Start Menu and select Microsoft Store.

Once in the Microsoft Store, open the search bar and search for winget. Select the App Installer and click install.

On the App Installer page, select Get to begin the download process. This will take a few minutes depending on your internet connection.

Once completed, you can verify you have winget running by opening the command prompt and running the command:

winget

You should see an output as shown:

Windows Package Manager (Preview) v1.3.1391-preview
Copyright (c) Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

The winget command line utility enables installing applications and other packages from the command line.

usage: winget [<command>] [<options>]

The following commands are available:
  install    Installs the given package
  show       Shows information about a package
  source     Manage sources of packages
  search     Find and show basic info of packages
  list       Display installed packages
  upgrade    Shows and performs available upgrades
  uninstall  Uninstalls the given package
  hash       Helper to hash installer files
  validate   Validates a manifest file
  settings   Open settings or set administrator settings
  features   Shows the status of experimental features
  export     Exports a list of the installed packages
  import     Installs all the packages in a file

For more details on a specific command, pass it the help argument. [-?]

The following options are available:
  -v,--version  Display the version of the tool
  --info        Display general info of the tool

More help can be found at: https://aka.ms/winget-command-help

Installing Winget via GitHub Download

If you do not wish to use the Microsoft Store, you can get wingetrunning from the Github page.

Open your browser and navigate to the resource provided below:

https://github.com/microsoft/winget-cli

Click on the releases page to select the installer.

On the Versions pane, navigate to the bottom of the page and select the file ending with msixbundle Click to download the file.

Once downloaded, click the file to launch the installation process. Follow along with the installation instructions to get winget set up on your machine.

Installing a Package with winget

Once you have winget setup on your machine, you can use it to install, update or remove packages from your command-line.

To install a package, use the command:

winget install [package]

For example, to install git with winget, we can run a command as shown:

winget install Git.Git

The command above should locate and install git on your system.

Winget Search Packages

You can search for available packages using the search command as shown in the syntax below:

winget search [package]

For example:

winget search redis

You should see a sample output as shown:

You can then select the package name and use the install command to install it on your system.

Winget Show Package Info

You can also view package information using the show command as shown in the syntax below:

winget show [package]

For example:

winget show Git.Git

This should return detailed information about the specified package as:

Winget Show Installed Packages

To view the list of installed packages using winget, use the list command as shown:

winget list

This should return an output as:

Winget Remove Package

To remove a specific package, you can use the uninstall command as shown:

winget uninstall [package_name]

For example:

winget uninstall Git.Git

Closing

In this tutorial, we showed you how to install the Windows Package Manager on Windows 10 and above. We also covered basic command usage such as installing and uninstalling packages, etc.

Thanks for reading!!