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In case you missed it, Windows Management Framework V5 Preview was released to the public today. One of the big things that this brings to the table is the OneGet module. What this module does is allow you to find and download packages from other shared repositories (in this case Chocolatey is the only one available at this time) and install those to your systems.

By the way, if you have any bug reports or feature request, the appropriate avenue to take is to log it on their codeplex site: https://oneget.codeplex.com/workitem/list/basic

First, let’s take a quick look at all of the available commands within this module.

Get-Command -Module OneGet

I’ll step through each of these cmdlets and provide examples (if applicable) of what they do. Note that there are currently no help documentation for this just yet. But there will be before the final release.

Get-PackageSource

This cmdlet will show all available sources that you can query for packages to download and install. In this case, only Chocolatey is available at this time.

Get-PackageSource

Note that this is not currently trusted.

Find-Package

This is the cmdlet that will help you to find a package on any of the available package sources. Run it without any parameters and you will get back a lot of packages.

There are quite a few parameters that you can use for filtering for names, version,etc…

Let’s go ahead and search for one package that we can then install.

Find-Package -Name Sysinternals

You can find out more about this package source under C:\Chocolatey

Install-Package

I know what I want from the source, now I want to install Sysinternals on my system. For that, I will use Install-Package to make this happen. There are quite a few parameters available here based on what you need to do.

I am going go the simple route with my installation and not use any of the parameters and just pipe the results of Find-Package into Install-Package.

Find-Package -Name Sysinternals |
Install-Package -Verbose

Remember what I said earlier about this source not being trusted? Well, here is where that comes into play. You will be asked if you want to continue with the installation of the package. This goes along the lines of always make sure you know what you are installing and if you truly trust the source of the package. In this case, I will go ahead and continue on with the installation.

Because I specified a Verbose stream, I can see all of the action happening behind the scenes from the download to the installation of the package. If successful, you will see the output object showing it as being installed.

I want to install at least one more package, but this time I am going to change my trust on the chocolatey provider so I won’t get that prompt again. Only do this if you no kidding trust the provider!

Add-PackageSource -Name chocolatey `
-Location http://chocolatey.org/api/v2 `
-Provider chocolatey -Trusted -Verbose

You could also edit the Chocolatey.config file and change the value of Trusted=”True”

Find-Package -Name Putty | 
Install-Package -Verbose

Note that there was no prompt this time for confirmation to download and install this package. You can also see how it downloaded and installed a dependent package as well.

You can explore the location of the packages under the C:\Chocolatey\lib folder.

For a more UI approach, try this:

Find-Package | Out-Gridview -PassThru | 
Install-Package -Verbose

Be patient with this as it may a minute to load everything up (this is going through the pipeline after all), so if you attempt to do anything before it finishes, it will cancel and nothing will show up to install.

7Zip looks like a good install here to choose.

Just in case you may not believe that it is actually installed yet…..:

Get-Package

By itself, this will show all installed packages on your local machine.

Get-Package

Not many parameters available for this cmdlet.

Not much to this one. If I want to find just a specific package, I can use one of the parameters to filter for it. Wildcards will not work here though, so if you want to find more than one package with a similar name, just don’t type a full name.

Get-Package -Name Putt

Uninstall-Package

This package does exactly what it says, it uninstalls a locally installed package on your local system.

In this case, I will remove Putty from my system. Actually, I want to remove both instances in this case.

Get-Package -Name Putt |
Uninstall-Package

And it is done! This was actually very fast.

Just like my other example, this provides a great UI approach as well.

Find-Package | Out-Gridview -PassThru | 
Install-Package -Verbose

Remove-PackageSource

This cmdlet is pretty self explanatory.

For the sake of showing an example, I am going to remove my only source and the re-add it again (you saw this earlier when I use Add-PackageSource to change the IsTrusted property).

Remove-PackageSource -Name chocolatey

Don’t be alarmed by the verbose output saying that it is creating a folder and saving a config file. This is just updating the package source config file to show that there are no package sources available now. Digging into the config file, you will see that it no longer has any information in it related to the chocolatey package source.

We can verify that we have no sources now using Get-PackageSource.

Now let’s re-add this in so I don’t get in trouble.

Add-PackageSource

Here we…add a package source that we know about so we can access the remote packages.

I will be using every parameter here (excluding the common ones of course). I want this to be trusted so I will use the –Trusted switch.

Add-PackageSource -Name chocolatey -Provider chocolatey `
-Trusted -Location http://chocolatey.org/api/v2/ -Verbose

A quick check of the config file shows that our beloved chocolatey source is now back available to use to use. Now to verify with Get-PackageSource.

Perfect! Our source has made its return! It will be more interesting to see how this will integrate with sources in an internal organization once we get more documentation. Also note that this does not verify that the source actually exists and is reachable. It only adds source to the config file.

Add-PackageSource -Name Fail `
-Location http://shouldnotwork `
-Provider Chocolatey -Trusted -Verbose

Working with a local repository

After a little research and work, I was able to stand up my own Nuget server to host an internal repository. You can find exactly what you need to do to install the server here. Seriously, do what it says and you will be just fine.

Once that was done, I needed to some packages to test out. There is this link that will help to create packages, but I was feeling a little impatient and used a couple of packages that I had already available from my previous installs.

In short, I now had a server and a couple of packages to use. First I created my package source.

Add-PackageSource -Name localrepo `
-Location http://localhost:50674/nuget/ `
-Provider Chocolatey -Trusted -Verbose

Verify the source shows up and then check for available packages.

Get-PackageSource
Find-Package -Source localrepo

Lastly, I need to install a package.

Find-Package -Source localrepo -Name sysinternals |
Install-Package -Verbose

Now we have a local repository that works great with OneGet!

And with that, we have gone through a simple walkthrough of all of the available cmdlets that OneGet has to offer at this time. Enjoy the latest release!