apt-get for Cygwin?

Question

Is there any apt-get-like program for use with Cygwin?

I already tried cyg-apt but when I try I get this error:

cyg-apt: downloading: http://cygwin.mirrors.pair.com/setup-2.bz2
cyg-apt: downloading: http://cygwin.mirrors.pair.com/setup-2.ini
cyg-apt: bad URL http://cygwin.mirrors.pair.com/setup-2.ini, exiting.

Answer 1

Best I have ever used:

apt-cyg package manager

Answer 2

You can do this using Cygwin’s setup.exe from Windows command line. Example:

cd C:\cygwin64
setup-x86_64 -q -P wget,tar,gawk,bzip2,subversion,vim

For a more convenient installer, you may want to use the apt-cyg package manager. Its syntax is similar to apt-get, which is a plus. For this, follow the above steps and then use Cygwin Bash for the following steps:

wget rawgit.com/transcode-open/apt-cyg/master/apt-cyg
install apt-cyg /bin

Now that apt-cyg is installed. Here are a few examples of installing some packages:

apt-cyg install nano
apt-cyg install git
apt-cyg install ca-certificates

Answer 3

Update: you can read the more complex answer, which contains more methods and information.

There exists a couple of scripts, which can be used as simple package managers. But as far as I know, none of them allows you to upgrade packages, because it’s not an easy task on Windows since there is not possible to overwrite files in use. So you have to close all Cygwin instances first and then you can use Cygwin’s native setup.exe (which itself does the upgrade via “replace after reboot” method, when files are in use).

---

apt-cyg

The best one for me. Simply because it’s one of the most recent. It works correctly for both platforms - x86 and x86_64. There exists a lot of forks with some additional features. For example the kou1okada fork is one of improved versions.

---

Cygwin’s setup.exe

It has also command line mode. Moreover it allows you to upgrade all installed packages at once.

setup.exe-x86_64.exe -q --packages=bash,vim

Example use:

setup.exe-x86_64.exe -q --packages="bash,vim"

You can create an alias for easier use, for example:

alias cyg-get="/cygdrive/d/path/to/cygwin/setup-x86_64.exe -q -P"

Then you can for example install the Vim package with:

cyg-get vim

Answer 4

you can always make a bash alias to setup*.exe files in $home/.bashrc

cygwin 32bit

alias cyg-get="/cygdrive/c/cygwin/setup-x86.exe -q -P"

cygwin 64bit

alias cyg-get="/cygdrive/c/cygwin64/setup-x86_64.exe -q -P"

now you can install packages with

cyg-get <package>

Answer 5

This got it working for me:

curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/transcode-open/apt-cyg/master/apt-cyg > \
apt-cyg && install apt-cyg /bin

Answer 6

No. The only officially supported tool for downloading and updating Cygwin packages is the setup.exe file you used for the initial install, although that can be invoked with command line arguments to help the process.

From that same page:

The basic reason for not having a more full-featured package manager is that such a program would need full access to all of Cygwin's POSIX functionality. That is, however, difficult to provide in a Cygwin-free environment, such as exists on first installation. Additionally, Windows does not easily allow overwriting of in-use executables so installing a new version of the Cygwin DLL while a package manager is using the DLL is problematic.

Answer 7

You can use Chocolatey to install cyg-get and then install your packages with it.

For example:

choco install cyg-get

Then:

cyg-get install my-package