Scoop: The Package Manager for Windows

Why should installing software directly from the terminal necessarily be reserved for Linux and MacOS?

Good news, that's no longer the case!

Scoop is a package manager that's as classic as they come, with the sole exception that it runs on Windows (and rather very well at that!).

But why use this kind of tool on Windows? Simply because it offers many advantages, such as:

• No more permission popups every which way
• Stop struggling with installers straight out of Windows 95
• Automatically install dependencies

But above all, Scoop has a very appealing feature:

• Software is installed in a portable way, and in a single folder managed by Scoop

All of this even allows you to keep a list of software you need to have on each machine, and reinstall it automatically during a migration!

How to use it?

Installing Scoop

The most complex phase of Scoop lies in its installation (which isn't actually very difficult), as you just need to run the following command in your Powershell console:

Set-ExecutionPolicy -ExecutionPolicy RemoteSigned -Scope CurrentUser
Invoke-RestMethod -Uri https://get.scoop.sh | Invoke-Expression

Note that this command comes directly from the official Scoop documentation

Installing a package

Once Scoop is installed, each piece of software can be installed with the install command like this:

scoop install python

And that's it!

Finding a package to install

In case you don't know exactly the name of the package you need to install, you can use the search command:

scoop search nodejs

Results from local buckets...

Name      Version  Source Binaries
----      -------  ------ --------
nodejs    20.0.0   main

And there you go, now you know how to use a package manager on Windows!