Do you miss Homebrew on Windows? Don't. Use Scoop.
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I don’t do a lot of development on Windows these days, but when I do I miss many things which I really like on OS X. One of them is a good package manager like Homebrew. Yes, I know about Chocolatey, but my experience with it was not good for various reasons. The main one is the process of contributing to the outdated packages, see Triage Process, it is long hard process. So, why Homebrew is better? Because repository with packages is just a GitHub repository with formulas, and anybody can contribute to it. This is why I was glad to meet Scoop for Windows. Scoop is based on the same idea as Homebrew, where author maintains just one GitHub repository with all formulas.
I would suggest you to watch the Scoop Demo video first
Below my workflow for installing Scoop
-
Install PowerShell 3.0 (Windows 7 has older version, if you are on Windows 8 you can skip this step).
-
Update execution policy (this is insecure, don’t do that on your servers)
$ set-executionpolicy unrestricted -s cu
- Install
Scoop
$ iex (new-object net.webclient).downloadstring('https://get.scoop.sh')
- Install core utils and tools
scoop install 7zip coreutils curl git grep openssh sed wget vim grep
coreutilsand some of these tools allow me to use mostly all the same set of tools which I use every day on OS X, likegrep,curl,ls,touch,tail,wcand so on.
- Change PowerShell theme
$ scoop install concfg
$ concfg import solarized small
$ scoop install pshazz
First two commands import theme called solarized, third command installs Pshazz script, which makes prompt look nice (plus Git info in prompt and tab completion).
- Generate SSH key.
$ ssh-keygen -t rsa -C "your_email@example.com"
$ cat ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub
The last command will show your public SSH key. If you are GitHub user, just add it to the list of your SSH keys. If you need it for something else - you probably know what to do.
What else I can say about Scoop? It does not have a lot of packages, but as author said it “Focuses on developer tools”. If you want to know more about Scoop, read wiki pages, and if you will like it you can always help.
Disclaimer: I don’t know Scoop author, I don’t have any relationship with Scoop, I share this tool with you only because I liked it. I suggest you to make a donation to Scoop, because this is what I did to say “thank you” to Scoop author.