Setting up my new workstation with some Chocolatey goodness.
9November 11, 2022 by Kenneth Fisher
As you might be aware I started a new job last week. Which means a new workstation and installing lots of tools. My new lead suggested that I try out a program called Chocolatey. Chocolatey is a software management solution that you can use through Powershell. Installing it on my workstation was pretty simple and took me something like 5 minutes. From there I installed Powershell Core, DbaTools, SQL Server Management Studio, and Azure Data Studio in 4 simple commands. The –yes just means that I don’t want to have to deal with prompts and just plan on accepting them all.
choco install powershell-core --yes
choco install dbatools --yes
choco install sql-server-management-studio --yes
choco install azure-data-studio --yes
And then every now and again when I want to make sure everything is up to date I can just run this:
choco upgrade all
And that will check for updates on all of the pieces of code that I’ve downloaded before using Chocolatey. Obviously, there is a lot more to this program than just installing a couple of programs and keeping them updated but even this little bit of the program is really useful.
SQL Studies 
Choco is awesome. A Linux admin showed me this a few years ago. It almost seems to good to be true.
This is interesting but begs the question , how does chocalatey know how to download the installation. For example for SSMS I go to MS web site and download it for installation. How does Choclatey know how to do that ?
I think they have “packages” built online that tell it where to go for the different tools. Can’t be sure though 🙂
This is a great post I’ve seen Chocolatey talked about referenced but never knew what it did. I can’t try this at work because everything is so locked down but I will definitely try this on my laptops here at home. Thank you for this post I always learn stuff from you.
Thanks! 🙂
Hey Kenneth,
Great post – new info.
However, if I run the Update command – I see this
choco update all
Chocolatey v1.1.0
Could not find a command registered that meets ‘update’.
Try choco -? for command reference/help.
That would be because it was supposed to be upgrade :). Fixing the code in the post. Thanks for pointing that out.
I was going to post the same – wow is that powerful.
You may want to add that after running Cmd as an Administrator and running Powershell that you should type in the following
Start-Process PowerShell -Verb RunAs
to get all of this chocolatey goodness to function as intended
I just run PoSH as administrator. Right click on the icon and you get options to run as administrator, run ISE, or run ISE as an administrator.