Using chocolatey to install lots of apps at once

Question

I am about to reinstall my Windows 10 pc, and would like to use Chocolatey for a lot of applications.

Can I just issue one command to Chocolatey and let it deal with the dependencies and installation order, or is it better to do one application at a time? Could I do a single:

choco install mobaxterm jdk8 intellijidea-community virtualbox vlc ...

or is it better to issue one command at a time?

Solution

Take a look at the documentation at https://docs.chocolatey.org/en-us/choco/commands/install (or type choco install -? at the command line (you may want to pipe that to more or less).

You certainly can issue a list of packages at once and it will work fine.

Consider however that a packages.config file will give you a bit more flexibility in passing options and switches for each packages. Here is the format:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<packages>
  <package id="apackage" />
  <package id="anotherPackage" version="1.1" />
  <package id="chocolateytestpackage" version="0.1" source="somelocation" />
  <package id="alloptions" version="0.1.1"
           source="https://somewhere/api/v2/" installArguments=""
           packageParameters="" forceX86="false" allowMultipleVersions="false"
           ignoreDependencies="false"
           />
</packages>

This will give you the ability to install multiple packages from one command.

Comments

[ferventcoder]

While you can certainly do this and it will work fine, the answer about using a packages.config will give you the greatest flexibility.

[JahMyst]

Why XML and not JSON or YAML ... This is so 1980s ;)