Chocolatey is a package manager that helps you install, upgrade, and uninstall packages (applications) on Windows quickly and easily from the command line.
Spoilers:
- The command I show in the video is simply: choco install sqltoolbelt
- Fun fact, you can also upgrade: choco upgrade sqltoolbelt
- And uninstall: choco uninstall sqltoolbelt
The rest of the 6.5 minutes is about related tools you may want to install, and why this is all needed.
Links from the video — check these out while you watch
Gists with sample commands for useful installs for Microsoft Data Platform database folks:
- Aaron Nelson’s List
- Kendra’s List (forked from Aaron’s to track my own preferences)
- Rob Sewell’s List
Video explaining Chocolatey and showing how to install SQL Toolbelt (6.5 minutes)
Transcript
Hello and welcome to this live stream episode.
My name is Kendra Little and I am a DevOps Advocate at Redgate.
Today I’m going to show you something that is a little bit life-changing for me. I have been setting up a new desktop and I’ve got a lot of apps to install, including things like Redgate SQL Toolbelt.
I remembered that I heard recently from my school my teammate Grant Fritchey, who’d heard from Steve Jones (also on our team) that when you’re setting up Windows the Chocolatey package manager can save you a bunch of time. I’d used Chocolatey briefly for setting up some tooling given out by our dev team for some cool preview stuff we’re doing, but I hadn’t really thought about the fact that it could save me a ton of time setting up Windows desktop apps. And it totally can.
So I want to show you a little bit about using Chocolatey to set up SQL Toolbelt.
So far today I have– just using the command line– installed SQL Server Management Studio, Azure Data Studio, Azure Data Studio PowerShell. All of the stuff you see on here, I have just installed using the command line.
I’ve even be able been able to customize installation. For example, I like to put the Sysinternals tools — these are tools like ZoomIt, Process Explorer, and Process Manager from the Sysinternals team at Microsoft— I like to put these in a custom folder. It’s where I always put it. I can actually pass in a parameter for that!
Sample commands for Chocolatey installs for SQL Server DBAs – some lists!
So these are a lot of the commands that I like to use: https://gist.github.com/LitKnd/93d02119cb10cef6992fd1bcddbdc73a
I forked this off a really useful gist from Aaron Nelson who has his favorite things to install with Chocolatey, too.
You can check out the things that Aaron likes to install, you can check out the things that I like to install.
All I did was I create a fork from Aaron so I could customize mine.
How to install Redgate SQL Toolbelt with Chocolatey
I just uninstalled SQL Toolbelt (before we started). Chocolatey is a package manager and it’ll help you both install packages and uninstall them.
Now I’m going to change my command to: choco install sqltoolbelt
This saves you so much time installing packages– because look it’s going out, it’s finding the latest version of the Installer, grabbing it for you, and then starting to run it for you.
Part of the magic here is that you have your list that you can maintain in something like a gist or source control, so you don’t even have to remember what all of the things are that you want to install every time. Then you can simply paste them in.
Then also you don’t have to step through all of the wizards. You don’t have to download them to directory, click Next Next Next Next finish. You will notice that for some things, like SQL Toolbelt it will pop up a window (an unattended install window) for you— it’ll let you know how it’s going. It really depends on how the Installer is written as to how that happens.
Certain things may take a little bit of time– like everything else it can take some time– but this really takes all the work out of it. You can just get it going, start working through your email for the day, or maybe figure out how you’re going to configure your livestream on your new computer and just have everything set up unattended in the background.
I’m really excited for this brave new world. I never thought I would see the day where with Windows it was this easy. We can see over here that SQL Toolbelt has been installed successfully. Freya and I can now move on and get going with our day.