Creating a Chocolatey package

September 1st, 2013

I recently “converted” all of my installed apps over to using Chocolatey. I won’t dwelve too deeply into how much I love it, but let’s just say it’s a lot. It’s such a relief not having to hunt for executable files. There were packages for nearly all of the apps I use but some were missing so I added a few of them. The process is pretty straightforward.

Let’s say we have an app that’s called MyAwesomeApp. First we need to create a directory called myawesomeapp and then create a nuspec file in it with the following content:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<package xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema">
  <metadata>
    <id>myawesomeapp</id>
    <title>MyAwesomeApp</title>
    <version>1.0</version>
    <authors>The creator's name</authors>
    <owners>Your name</owners>
    <summary>An awesome app</summary>
    <description>An incredible awesome app that'll one day save the
    world!</description>
    <projectUrl>http://example.com/</projectUrl>
    <tags>awesome awesome awesome</tags>
    <licenseUrl>http://example.com/license.html</licenseUrl>
    <requireLicenseAcceptance>false</requireLicenseAcceptance>
    <iconUrl>http://example.com/logo.png</iconUrl>
    <releaseNotes>http://example.com/news/</releaseNotes>
  </metadata>
  <files>
    <file src="tools\*" target="tools" />
  </files>
</package>

Then it’s time to create a chocolateyInstall.ps1 file and save it in another directory inside the myawesomeapp directory called tools. Now, we could technically do it as simple as this:

Install-ChocolateyPackage "MyAwesomeApp" "exe" "/quiet"
"http://example.com/download/installer.exe"

But I like adding a bit more functionality so instead we’ll use this:

$Package = "MyAwesomeApp"
$PackageParams = @{
  packageName = $Package;
  fileType = "exe";
  silentArgs = "/quiet";
  url = "http://example.com/download/installer.exe";
}

Try {
  Install-ChocolateyPackage @PackageParams
  Write-ChocolateySuccess $Package
} Catch {
  Write-ChocolateyFailure $Package "$($_.Exception.Message)"
  Throw
}

This feels a bit nicer and it’s a hell of a lot easier to re-use, atleast for me. After this we need to run cpack in the root directory to create a nupkg file and then cinst myawesomeapp -source %cd% to test it. The last thing we need to do is to upload the generated nupkg file on the official Chocolatey website. You could do this straight from the PowerShell, but I haven’t done that yet.