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Package managers

When you want to install programs on your computer, you might be used to either downloading the program from their website or using your operating systems app store. However, there are also ways to install programs from the command-line. In order to do this, we use something called a package manager. Package is just a different (and more general) name for referring to a program. Package managers provide a central and unified way of installing programs and tools, and are especially useful for installing developer tools. They also make it a lot easier to install a lot programs all at once.

There are a lot of different package managers, and which ones are available to you depends on which operating system you use. Most of them follow them same patterns for how to use them. Here we will help you install a package manager and provide you with the basics commands for using it.

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{{ .linux .macos}} Windows

On Windows when you're using WSL you can use apt to install programs inside of WSL. This is useful for programming tools like git or installing compilers like GHC which you might want to use in WSL. However it might still be nice to be able to install programs outside of WSL. This can help you keep programs up to date easier, or allow you to install programs in an easier way.

The two most popular package managers for Windows are winget and chocolatey. Windows comes preinstalled with winget but it has fewer packages while chocolatey requires you to install it but has more packages. The main reason for this is that chocolatey has a community repository, which allows users to publish packages themselves and upload them. This might sound scary, but is quite normal, just be sure that you're installing the right package! If you want to see what packages are available in both you can see winget package search and chocolatey community package search.

To install chocolatey use this command in CMD:

@"%SystemRoot%\System32\WindowsPowerShell\v1.0\powershell.exe" -NoProfile -InputFormat None -ExecutionPolicy Bypass -Command "[System.Net.ServicePointManager]::SecurityProtocol = 3072; iex ((New-Object System.Net.WebClient).DownloadString('https://community.chocolatey.org/install.ps1'))" && SET "PATH=%PATH%;%ALLUSERSPROFILE%\chocolatey\bin"

or this command in PowerShell:

Set-ExecutionPolicy Bypass -Scope Process -Force; [System.Net.ServicePointManager]::SecurityProtocol = [System.Net.ServicePointManager]::SecurityProtocol -bor 3072; iex ((New-Object System.Net.WebClient).DownloadString('https://community.chocolatey.org/install.ps1'))

To verify your install use choco -v

Apt (inside of Ubuntu WSL)

Winget (inside of CMD or PowerShell)

Chocolatey (inside of CMD or PowerShell)

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{{ .windows .linux }} MacOS

On MacOS we recommend using Homebrew. There are a few other MacOS package managers but none of them¹ are as up to date and have as many packages as Homebrew. It can be installed by following the instructions here. There you can also find more information about it. Homebrew uses the terms cask and formula, which can be a bit confusing. In Homebrew, a cask (generally) refers to a graphical program, and a formula is a command line tool.

To use Homebrew these are the basic commands you will use:

Updating

The differentiation between update and upgrade here is important. Update means to update Homebrew itself, which also includes updating the version of packages that can be installed. Upgrade is what actually updates the packages on your computer to the most recent version. After upgrading we suggest always running brew cleanup as well to get rid of old files. They can all be run together with:

brew update && brew upgrade && brew cleanup

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{{ .windows .macos }} Linux

If you are on Linux, you already have a package manager installed! There are however a lot them to choose from which all work in slightly different ways, and which one you have depends on the distro you use. For this reason we will only cover how to use some of the more common ones from the larger distros. If yours is not listed, try searching for <distro> package manager and you should find some documentation for it.

Apt (Ubuntu, Mint, Debian)

Apt is one of the largest package managers and is used on a lot of systems.

Dnf (Fedora)

Pacman (Arch, Manjaro, Artix)

Pacman is the base package manager that comes with Arch Linux and any distros that are derived from it. There are various helpers that you can install that make it easier to install some packages. If you have one of these, just replace pacman with the name of your helper in the commands below.

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