Chocolatey machine setup

How well automated is your machine setup process? After watching Zach Holman’s excellent video Unsucking Your Teams Development Environment I got to thinking about the setup process we have at Extend Health (who is hiring, come work with us!). While we’ve always talked about smoothing out the process of setting up a new machine, we’ve never actually gotten around to it. That is, until now.

For GitHub, they use what they call The Setup which is a Ruby script that uses Puppet to manage all their machines. When I had first looked at Puppet a couple years ago, Windows support was not an option. It appears that this has changed. While we investigate using Puppet, my friend Kyle and I have begun setting up a system that uses Chocolatey and straight PowerShell to set up our Windows boxes.

So what exactly is Chocolatey? Chocolatey is a package manager designed for Windows and is modeled somewhat like apt-get for Linux. Essentially it uses the NuGet infrastructure to deliver software such as Vim or Skype. This makes Chocolatey an attractive option because like NuGet, you can host your own feed of software that can be installed on your machine.

Once we decided we’d go with Chocolatey we needed to set up a test base. So we got ourselves set up with a vanilla Windows 7 VM. This works great since we can play around with setting up a brand new Windows install and then restore when we want to try it again. This also helped expose one of our first problems in setting up a new machine. Chocolatey requires .NET 4.0 to be installed before it will work.

While I’m admittedly not the biggest fan of PowerShell, when it comes to scripting Windows to do what you want, it can definitely come in handy. Kyle came across a very handy PowerShell module called PSWindowsUpdate. Once we got that script working and how to continue our script using elevated permissions we were off. Here’s the line we got directly from the PSWindows update example.

Get-WUInstall -ServiceID 9482f4b4-e343-43b6-b170-9a65bc822c77 -Title ".NET Framework 4" -AcceptAll

The last thing we were able to do this Friday was get PSWindows update to install .NET 4.0 and Chocolatey! Exciting news for us because now we should be able to take a brand new machine and install everything we need to write code at Work.

So where do we take it from here? We’ve got many plans for our own setup script but the first step is to make the initial setup from a new machine to getting the right software installed. We’ve gotten .NET 4.0 out of the way but now we need to see what other snags we may run into. We also need to see how we can get Visual Studio 2010 and SQL Server 2012 installed. From there we’d also like to start making profiles so QA and our DB teams can also plug into what we’re building.

Longer term, we’d also like to keep investigating what Puppet may be able to provide and start trying out options there, but for now this is a great step forward in automating the suck out of our setup process.