Automating windows development environments

Jan 2, 2015 · 1 minute read

My job at Puppet Labs has given me an excuse to take a closer look at the advancements in Windows automation, in particular Chocolatey and BoxStarter. The following is very much a work in progress but it’s hopefully useful for a few things:

• If like me you’ve mainly been doing non-Windows development for a while it’s interesting to see what is possible
• If you’re starting out with infrastructure development on Windows the following could be a good starting place
• if you’re an experienced Windows pro then you can let me know of any improvements

All that’s needed is to run the following from a CMD or Powershell prompt on a new Windows machine (you can also visit the URL in Internet Explorer if you prefer).

START http://boxstarter.org/package/nr/url?https://gist.githubusercontent.com/garethr/a1838aa68355a0766de4/raw/d92b41ee9dcad68c079d24c64bac7d1d27cf37c7/garethr.ps1

This launches BoxStarter, which executes the following code:

This takes a while as it runs Windows update and repeatedly reboots the machine. But once completed you’ll have the listed software installed and configured on a newly up-to-date Windows machine.