Getting Started

##Using chocolatey Now that you have chocolatey on your machine (need to install?), you can run several commands.

Take a look at the command reference. We are going to be using the install command.

Let's install Notepad++.

1. Open a command line.
2. Type cinst notepadplusplus and press Enter.
3. If you have UAC turned on or are not an administrator, chocolatey is going to request administrative permission at some point (at least once during the process). Otherwise it will not be able to finish what it is doing successfully. If you don't have UAC turned on, it will just continue on without stopping to bother you.
4. That's it. Pretty simple but powerful little concept!

##How does chocolatey work? When a package has an exe file, chocolatey will create a link "shortcut" to the file so that you can run that tool anywhere on the machine.
When a package has a chocolateyInstall.ps1, it will run the script. The instructions in the file can be anything. This is limited only by the .NET framework and powershell.
Most of the chocolatey packages that take advantage of the powershell download an application installer and execute it silently.

Where are chocolatey packages installed to?

Chocolatey packages are installed to various locations, depending on how the package maintainer created the package.

Some packages are installed under ChocolateyInstall\lib, others - especially packages that are based on Windows installers (.msi-files) - install to the default path of the original installer (which is most likely within Program Files).

There are also packages for which you can set a custom installation path. These packages (like ruby) use the chocolatey_bin_root environment variable. If this variable does not exist, the packages will be installed directly under the system root (f. ex. C:\ruby193). To change this behaviour, you can set chocolatey_bin_root to an existing subfolder of your system partition (leaving out the drive letter), e. g. ChocoPackages. Packages that use the environment variable, will then be installed in the given subfolder, f. ex. C:\ChocoPackages\ruby193.

If you don't like to clutter up your system partition with installed applications, you are advised to set the chocolatey_bin_root environment variable.

##Where does chocolatey install packages from? By default it installs packages from both chocolatey.org and nuget.org. That means you can install packages that don't appear to exist on chocolatey.org. Go ahead, install nuget.exe cinst nuget.commandline.