Installing software on Windows in an automatable, repeatable and easy way in Windows has always been painful in the past. Luckily, in recent years there have been some really nice additions to Windows and its ecosystem that have improved the process significantly. The main tools that ease this process are Powershell and Chocolatey and these tools have significantly improved the developer and administrative experiences in Windows.
In the past, in order to install something like a programming language and its environment you would have to manually download the zip or tar file, extract it, put it in the correct place, set up environment variables and system paths manually, etc. Things would also break pretty easily and it was just painful in general to work with.
Hopefully you are already familiar with Powershell at least because I won’t be covering it much in this post. If you have any recent version of Windows you should have Powershell. Below I describe Chocolately a little bit and why it is useful so you can find out more in the post or you can check out the Chocolately website, which does a much better job of explaining its benefits, how it is used and why package managers are good.
Update Windows execution policy
This process is pretty straight forward. Make sure you open up a Powershell prompt with admin privileges, otherwise you will run into problems. The first step is to change the default system execution policy (if you haven’t already). On a fresh install of Windows, you will need to loosen up the security in order to install Chocolatey, which will be used to install and mange Node.js. Luckily there are just a few Powershell commands that need to run. To check the status of the execution policy, run the following.
Get-ExecutionPolicy Restricted
This should tell you what your execution policy is currently set to. To loosen the policy for Choco, run the following command.
Set-ExecutionPolicy -ExecutionPolicy RemoteSigned
Follow the prompt and choose [Y] to update the policy. Now, if you run Get-ExecutionPolicy you should see RemoteSigned.
Get-ExecutionPolicy RemoteSigned
If you don’t have your execution policy opened up to at least RemoteSigned, you will have trouble installing things from the internet, including Chocoloatey. You can find more information about Execution Policies here if you don’t trust me or just want a better idea of how they work.
Install Chocolatey
If you aren’t familiar, Chocolately is a package manager for Windows, similar to apt-get on Debian Linux systems or yum on Redhat based systems. It allows users to quickly and easily install and manage software packages on Windows platforms through Powershell.
The steps to installing are Chocolatey are listed below.
iwr https://chocolatey.org/install.ps1 -UseBasicParsing | iex
This command will take care of pretty much all of the setup so just watch it do its thing. Again, make sure you are inside of an elevated admin shell, otherwise you will likely have problems with the installation.
Install Node.js
The last step (finally) is to install Node.js. Luckily this is the easiest part. Just run the following command.
choco install nodejs.install
Choose [Y] to accept that you want to run the install script and let it run. There should be some colored output and when it is done Node should be installed on your system. You will need to make sure you close and re-open you Powershell prompt to get the Node binaries to be picked up on your PATH, or just source the shell by running “RefreshEnv” to pick up the new path. If you are in an admin shell I would recommend dropping out of it by simply closing the current session and opening up a new, non privileged session.
Once you have a fresh shell you can test that Node installed properly.
node -v v6.6.0
Now you are ready to go. It only took a few minutes with the Choco package manger. If you are new to Node in general and are looking for a good resource, the learn you the node project on github is pretty decent.
Let me know if you have any caveats to add to this method, it is the easiest and fastest way I have found to installing Node as well as other pieces of software in Windows without any hassle.
