Using Chocolatey to set up a development environment

February 12, 2020

dev

chocolatey

We've all been there: one fine day, you arrive at work and get the great news that you'll be getting a brand-new PC to work on! Top-tier SSD, latest generation I7, and enough memory to almost keep Chrome open for a day!

But then you remember: oh my goodness, I have to install everything again!

To ease the pain, we'll use Chocolatey to install everything we need on our new machine: Visual Studio, VS Code, Python, Node, Ruby, and all the indispensable tools for a development machine.

The first step is to install Chocolatey on the machine. Nothing complicated. Just open a PowerShell window and run in admin mode:

1Set-ExecutionPolicy Bypass -Scope Process -Force; [System.Net.ServicePointManager]::SecurityProtocol = [System.Net.ServicePointManager]::SecurityProtocol -bor 3072; iex ((New-Object System.Net.WebClient).DownloadString('https://chocolatey.org/install.ps1'))

From here, to install anything, just use:

1choco install vscode
2choco install nodejs
3choco install python

We're already taking a step in the right direction, but we can do better: we can create a script to automate the entire process:

1[string[]]$appList=
2    'nodejs',
3    'notepadplusplus',
4    'python',
5    'ruby',
6    'jekyll', 
7    'googlechrome', 
8    'firefox', 
9    'microsoft-edge',
10    'microsoft-windows-terminal',
11    'git', 
12    'vscode',
13    'visualstudio2019professional',
14    'docker-desktop'
15
16try {
17    choco config get cachelocation
18} catch {
19    Write-Output "Chocolatey parece não estar instalado. Tentando instalar"
20    Set-ExecutionPolicy Bypass -Scope Process -Force; [System.Net.ServicePointManager]::SecurityProtocol = [System.Net.ServicePointManager]::SecurityProtocol -bor 3072;
21    Invoke-Expression ((New-Object System.Net.WebClient).DownloadString('https://chocolatey.org/install.ps1'))
22}
23
24foreach ($app in $appList) {
25    Write-Output "Instalando   $($app)"
26    & choco install $app /y 
27    Write-Output "================================================================================"
28    Write-Output "$($app) Instalado "
29    Write-Output "================================================================================"
30}

Since the script is located in my GitHub repository, I can start the entire process with a single line of PowerShell.

1Invoke-Expression ((New-Object System.Net.WebClient).DownloadString('https://raw.githubusercontent.com/pedroroque/scripts/master/chocolatey/devmachine.ps1'))

Pedro Roque

Using Chocolatey to set up a development environment