Scoop – A command-line installer for Windows

http://scoop.sh/

by wubbfindel • 13 years ago

125 55 13 years ago

scoop.sh

steele• 13 years ago

what are some differences between this and chocolatey?

tr4656• 13 years ago

Seems to have less programs but might be easier to work with.

matthewbadeau• 13 years ago

From a cursory glance, I can see that scoop is installed in your $env:LOCALAPPDATA path. While Chocolatey is, by suggested default, installed in C:\chocolatey\. This is a plus for scoop since installing in your root is usually bad practice and can make managing your machine more difficult for systems administrators. This also allows a standard user to install applications without administrator approval. (so long as they can execute unsigned PowerShell scripts)

manojlds3• 13 years ago

Exactly something that could have been pushed into Chocolatey. The biggest thing about these kind of tools is to add and maintain the packages. Chocolatey has been gaining momentum and has a lot of packages. Now, there comes a new kid in the block.

eddiegroves• 13 years ago

taylorlapeyre• 13 years ago

Wow, this is incredible. Exactly what I needed to start developing on Windows.

csmuk6• 13 years ago

Why? I've been doing it since 1992 without the aid of this!

voltagex_5• 13 years ago

It's probably closer to a more extensible version of Ninite or even a friendly version of SCCM.

mayanksinghal• 13 years ago

It's incredible and useful because there are some others like me, who would rather reboot to Ubuntu/Fedora/etc just to avoid the hostile developer environment of windows, even for small tasks.

There is a severe lack of good commandline utilities. The ones that exist, require so much effort to set up. Just because it is possible to develop on Windows since 1992 doesn't mean it is a pleasant experience to do so.

philliphaydon2• 13 years ago

Looks a little easier to use the chocolatey.

Bookmarking this for sure!

RachelF• 13 years ago

Wonderful - thank you!

voltagex_5• 13 years ago

iex (new-object net.webclient).downloadstring('https://get.scoop.sh')
Note: if you get an error you might need to change the execution policy (i.e. enable Powershell) with set-executionpolicy unrestricted -s cu

The Windows equivalent of curl | sudo bash...

Please don't do this. Sign your Powershell scripts.

lucajona12• 13 years ago

Powershell really is crippled by default, unlike bash. Your equivalent is only equivalent (the sudo part) if you start powershell with 'run as administrator', which you probably shouldn't, but it's quite common practise because Windows doesn't have a good, convenient equivalent to sudo. Luckily you can install one with 'scoop install sudo'.

Note you don't need to run as admin to install scoop--it's all about installing stuff for your user account without requiring elevation.

You are right though that you probably shouldn't just run scripts like this if you don't trust them. I do it all the time because it's convenient and I'm not running elevated. You can always check the source if you're not sure.

voltagex_5• 13 years ago

In many organisations, the security advice is to force AllSigned via group policy - this script will never run.

xradionut• 13 years ago

PowerShell is designed for Windows/Exchange administrators and SQL Server DBAs, and not really any one else. It's powerful when used by those roles due to all the time spent by Redmond and others developing the commandlets for these specific process. Outside of this problem realm it sucks as a scripting language or a CLI environment.

dkordik• 13 years ago

Wow, something like this has been sorely lacking. Thanks!

manojlds3• 13 years ago

Why, there has been Chocolatey - http://chocolatey.org/

lucajona12• 13 years ago

Author here. I use Chocolatey too, although not so often recently.

Scoop is more focused on open-source command-line developer tools. I expect Scoop will appeal more to cross-platform developers, those who appreciate a bit of Unix philosophy in their spare time, and those who feel 'stuck' on Windows.

Chocolatey does a lot of things that Scoop will never do, like install Web Platform Installer apps, and built-in Windows features.

taivare• 13 years ago

what dev tools are in the buckets ? ~ set-executionpolicy unrestricted -s cu ??...

lucajona12• 13 years ago

You're going to have to set-execution policy yourself—I highly recommend it though for a useable shell ;)

So far there are 59 apps in the main bucket: https://github.com/lukesampson/scoop/tree/master/bucket

There are 17 more apps in the 'extras' bucket: https://github.com/lukesampson/scoop-extras/tree/master

To use the extras bucket, you just need to run 'scoop bucket add extras'.

Any requests for more dev tools? Feel free to add an issue or pull request on GitHub.

bilalq• 13 years ago

Wow, this is just as awesome as brew on OSX. I had no idea that there was an alternative to the hideous command prompt. I installed Windows 8.1 on a desktop last week, and this has finally convinced me that it is feasible to use as dev machine.

zxcvgm• 13 years ago

Interesting. I used to download and unpack zip files manually from the gnuwin32 SF project until I found mingw-get[1] which downloads and installs packages from the MinGW32 and MSYS projects. Problem with that was it lacked packages like curl which I still had to get from elsewhere.

It seems that quite a number of apps in Scoop pulls from these projects.

[1] http://www.mingw.org/wiki/Getting_Started

tiedemann• 13 years ago

If you have git on the command line in Windows a lot of the most common programs are already there (see https://github.com/msysgit/msysgit/tree/master/bin).

lucajona12• 13 years ago

Yes that's true for common programs like less, tail, grep, awk, and sed. I do think Scoop can give you better support for ln and sudo though. Then on top of that, Scoop lets you install Ruby, Postgres, Figlet, Go, Vim etc.

For a lot of GNU core utilities, Scoop uses the same MSYS programs that come with MSYS Git, it's just installing them separately so you can choose only the ones you need.

FrojoS• 13 years ago

Out of curiosity, is there anyone here who uses the virtual machine approach to get unix tools onto Windows? Wouldn't that work much better?

I'm currently using OSX as my development os and I would like to switch to Windows because I do a lot of hardware hacking and often drivers are Windows only. The only things that holds me back are battery life (about half compared to OSX) and command line tools.

swah2• 13 years ago

Of course, Vagrant is great. But does not make Windows a Unix...

hengheng• 13 years ago

Sure, VMWare Player with a shared folder pretty much lets you act with a shell onto a (Windows) directory. I don't know how much this helps you with hardware evelopment though.

swah2• 13 years ago

Also, at least with Virtualbox, file change detection doesn't work. So if you depend of that to recompile your SASS or something, bad luck.

decad• 13 years ago

For anyone behind a proxy try:

$s=new-object net.webclient;$s.proxy.credentials=[system.net.credentialcache]::defaultnetworkcredentials;$s.downloadstring('https://get.scoop.sh')|iex

john2x• 13 years ago

Interesting. I've only every tried Cygwin a long time ago, and I remember it being a pain to use and setup, but it was the only thing available at the time. Is this an alternative to Cygwin? Why should I pick this over Cygwin? (might be a good FAQ entry?)

lucajona12• 13 years ago

Good question.

I think you'd want to pick Cygwin when you want to be able to compile and run POSIX apps on Windows without having to modify them too much.

However, if you just want a better command-line experience on Windows and want to easily install cross-platform open-source programs, I think Scoop is a better alternative to Cygwin.

If that is what you want, then not being a pain to use and setup is one good reason to pick Scoop :)

Also, Cygwin programs can only run under the Cygwin environment, whereas the programs Scoop installs are usually native programs that can be called from any other Windows program, or executed from a normal console. I assume there's a way to call Cygwin programs from a normal win program too--it's just more round-about.

maxerickson• 13 years ago

Cygwin programs don't all depend on a Cygwin environment, most of the work occurs at the C library level. Some stuff might want a shell with more or different features than you get with the windows cmd shell.

oblio• 13 years ago

I'm really curious what the major hurdles to using Cygwin were, at least from an Unix user point of view. I've been using it for the past 6 years or so and I'm quite happy.

These days I feel that the best bet on Windows is to install the 20 or so Windows specific programs that you probably use + Cygwin.

stinos• 13 years ago

This seems nice. In fact, this almost does what I've been doing for years through a script. The major functional difference between my script and your otherwise excellent idea is that I try to avoid installing anything. And that is possible for pretty much everything in your list.So please favour portable versions instead of installers. And if possible and only an installer is supplied, please check if you can't get the app anyway by simply unpacking the msi and getting the files out of it.

userulluipeste• 13 years ago

That's OK whenever you can do that, but with databases and other such tools; deployment of which involves launching background services, installing logical drivers or some kind of convoluted configuration; it is a little difficult to have them created and maintained as portables.

lucajona12• 13 years ago

I totally agree. Self-contained installs without side-effects are the goal for Scoop, and it's almost there. Scoop extracts NSIS/NullSoft and InnoSetup installers already, and if all goes well it'll extract MSI installers soon too (using lessmsi).

If you're building your own package for Scoop and you just want to run the installer, there's good support for that too.

duncans• 13 years ago

Note you can extract an MSI using:

    msiexec /a foo.msi /qb TARGETDIR="c:\temp\bar"

serkanyersen• 13 years ago

Nice project, I think this was very much needed for windows. Having a proper shell is pretty much mandatory for web development these days and I think this will help great deal for developers who would prefer windows.

Completely unrelated but you might want to silence the parts where you type your passwords in the video, some one can easily predict your password by keyboard's click sounds. For example your github password is 7 characters long and contains `w` or `n` in first 3 letters.

lucajona12• 13 years ago

Thanks!

Scoop – A command-line installer for Windows

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