As a developer, installing new applications or tools can be a recurrent, fastidious and time consuming task.

Some operating systems are shipped with a package manager to make this task easier.

When it is not delivered with the OS, developers usually developed their own.

In this article I will present you one package manager for:

• Microsoft Windows,
• Linux,
• and Mac OS X.

If you ever used Linux, you probably know how easy it is to install softwares on this operating system.

Just by using apt-get, aptitude, yum, etc… depending your distribution, you just have to make a research and then install the package corresponding to the tool you need.

For example, if you need wget you just have to type in the command line apt-get install wget and the package manager will download and install the tool for you.

Example of package managers for some Linux distributions:

There is no package manager shipped with Microsoft Windows but you can install one on your own.

Just go on Chocolatey installation page and follow the documentation steps.

During the installation, you will execute a command from the windows command prompt in administrator mode (there is a way to install Chocolatey with non-administrative rights but it’s not recommended by Chocolatey).

In the windows start menu, search for cmd and right-click on the icon to select Run as administrator.

Now, you need to install wget?

Just do:

C:\>choco install wget

And then you are ready to use wget on your windows workstation 🙂

C:\>wget https://www.google.com

In a similar way as Microsoft Windows, there isn’t a native package manager working with a remote repository but you can install one. This one is called Homebrew.

Just go on Homebrew Homepage and follow installation instructions. This is really simple, you just have to type one command in the terminal.

Once the installation is finished, to install wget you just have to type:

brew install wget