Chocolatey

Chocolatey (https://chocolatey.org) is the community package manager for Windows.

Parsing notes:

  • Every operation passes --limit-output, whose pipe-delimited rows are the machine-readable format; --no-progress, --no-color and --retry-count ride along as post_args on every invocation.

  • choco search reaches into all package metadata by default: the {id_name_only_args} template narrows it to package IDs for mpm’s default --id-name-only mode, and {exact_args} maps --exact.

mpm requires Chocolatey 2.0.0 or newer, the first release where choco list reports installed packages without the removed --local-only flag.

Platforms

  • 🪟 Windows

Operations

Operation

Supported

installed

✓

outdated

✓

search

✓

install

✓

upgrade

✓

upgrade_all

✓

remove

✓

sync

cleanup

Ecosystem

  • Accepted purl types: pkg:choco, pkg:chocolatey

Usage

$ mpm --choco installed
$ mpm --choco search "query"
$ mpm --choco upgrade --all
$ mpm install pkg:choco/hello
$ mpm --dry-run --choco upgrade --all

Every example above accepts --dry-run, which simulates the underlying manager calls without touching the system: the safe way to watch what mpm would do before trusting it.

Deselect the manager for a single run with --no-choco, disable it from your configuration, or tune its invocation attributes with per-manager overrides.

Command line

  • CLI names, in lookup order: choco

  • Arguments forced after each call: --no-progress --no-color --retry-count=3

The version is probed by running:

$ choco --version
2.2.2

and extracted with:

r"(?P<version>\S+)"

Privilege escalation

mpm runs this manager as the current user and never prepends sudo by default. Flip the policy for its privileged operations with --sudo or the per-manager sudo override.

None of its operations needs root.

See privilege escalation for the full policy.

Cooldown

State of Chocolatey’s release-age gating, from the cooldown support table:

  • Status: ❌ None

With --cooldown set, mpm skips this manager’s install and upgrade operations rather than run them unguarded (fail-closed); --allow-unsupported-managers opts back in.

Reference traces

Raw native outputs captured in the bundled definition: the reference mpm’s parsers were written against. If you know Chocolatey well and a transcript below looks wrong, or a newer release changed its output format, report it.

$ choco list --limit-output
adobereader|11.0.10
ccleaner|5.03.5128
chocolatey|0.9.9.2
ConEmu|14.9.23.0
gimp|2.8.14.1
git|1.9.5.20150114

$ choco outdated --limit-output
7zip.commandline|16.02.0.20170209|16.02.0.20170209|false
atom|1.23.3|1.24.0|false
bulkrenameutility|3.0.0.1|3.0.0.1|false

$ choco search {query} --limit-output {id_name_only_args} {exact_args}
virtualbox|6.1.0
VirtualBox.ExtensionPack|5.1.10.20161223
enigmavirtualbox|9.20
virtualbox-guest-additions-guest.install|6.1.0