Today I released Boxstarter 2.6. This release brings Chocolatey support up to the latest beta release of the Chocolatey core library. In March of this year, Chocolatey released a fully rewritten version 0.9.9. Prior to this release, Chocolatey was released as a Powershell module. Boxstarter intercepted every Chocolatey call and could easily maintain state as both chocolatey and boxstarter coexisted inside the same powershell process. With the 0.9.9 rewrite, Chocolatey ships as a .Net executable and creates a separate powershell process to run each package. So there has been lot of work to create a different execution flow requiring changes to almost every aspect of Boxstarter. While this may not introduce new boxstarter features, it does mean one can now take advantage of all new features in Chocolatey today.
A non breaking release
This release should not introduce any breaking functionality from previous releases. I have tested many different usage scenarios. I also increased the overall unit and functional test coverage of boxstarter in this release to be able to more easily validate the impact of the Chocolatey overhaul. That all said, there has been alot of changes to how boxstarter and chocolatey interact and its always possible that some bugs have hidden themselves away. So please report issues on github as soon as you encounter problems and I will do my best to resolve problems quickly. Pull requests are welcome too!
Where is Chocolatey?
One thing that may come as a surprise to some is that Boxstarter no longer installs Chocolatey. One may wonder, how can this be? Well, Chocolatey now exposes its core functionality via an API (chocolatey.dll). So if you are setting up a new machine with boxstarter, you will still find the Chocolatey repository in c:\ProgramData\Chocolatey, but no choco.exe. Further the typical chocolatey commands: choco, cinst, cup, etc will not be recognized commands on the command line after the Boxstarter run unless you explicitly install Chocolatey.
You may do just that: install chocolatey inside a boxstarter package if you would like the machine setup to include a working chocolatey command line.
iex ((new-object net.webclient).DownloadString('https://chocolatey.org/install.ps1'))You'd have to be nuts NOT to want that.
Running 0.9.10-beta-20151210
When I say Boxstarter is running the latest Chocolatey, I really mean the latest prerelease. Why? That has a working version of the WindowsFeatures chocolatey feed. When the new version of Chocolatey was released, The WindowsFeature source feed did not make it in. However it has been recently added and because it is common to want to toggle windows features when setting up a machine and many Boxstarter packages make use of it, I consider it an important feature to include.