Chocolatey, in its own GitHub project, describes itself as being “like yum or apt-get, but for Windows” — a command-line package manager that lets users install software with a single instruction such as “choco install.” It brought to Windows the kind of scripted, repeatable software installation that Linux users had long taken for granted from apt and yum.
The tool was created by Rob Reynolds, with first public releases around 2011, years before Microsoft shipped its own winget. Chocolatey is written largely in C# and PowerShell and runs on the .NET Framework; its packages are PowerShell-driven scripts that wrap the underlying installers Windows applications normally ship as. The project’s documentation shows commands like “choco install” as the core workflow.
Because it could automate silent installs and upgrades across many machines, Chocolatey became a staple of Windows automation, build servers, and IT provisioning long before a first-party Windows package manager existed. It demonstrated that the package-manager model, native to Unix-like systems, could work on Windows too.
When Microsoft later introduced winget as the official Windows Package Manager, Chocolatey remained widely used, with a large community package catalog and an established place in the Windows DevOps toolchain.