Discovering Winget

Introduction

Here is one for the IT Professionals! – Many of us are familiar with utilizing package managers in Linux. Many that come to mind include the likes of yum, apt, and dnf. However, what you may not know is in later version of Windows 10, and in Windows 11. There is a package manager built in. This is known as winget.

Winget utilizes its own repository, and the Microsoft Store to help download packages and install them. Utilizing a command such as

winget install putty

This command above will search the Microsoft Store and the Winget repository to find putty. As you see in my example below, you might get some duplicates. How do you choose a specific one?

To do this, make sure you run:

winget install --id=PuTTY.PuTTY

Searching for Packages

With Winget you can search for packages, just as you can on your linux counter parts. To search for a package try

winget search [PACKAGE_NAME]

In my example below you can see what a winget search would look like

Updating Packages

Just like you might run ‘apt update’ and ‘apt upgrade’ in Ubuntu. Windows allows you do the same to update packages. Utilizing

winget update [PACKAGE_NAME]

⚠️Updating packages through winget will not work if they were install via a .EXE

Find More Packages

Using the default winget commands are not all you need to find more packages. A wonderful website called winstall.app also showcases a lot of commands to utilize winget for your favorite apps such as Spotify, Notepad++, and more. Similar to Ninite, winstall will even help to create a script that bundles all your favorite apps to be installed simultaneously.