Last week, I built a package for Dynamsoft Barcode Reader using Chocolatey. One thing disappointed me that I can’t specify the installation directory if I don’t have a licensed Chocolatey edition. It means all packages will be installed to C:\ProgramData\chocolatey\lib. I do worry about my C drive storage spaces. Therefore, I decided to use PowerShell script moving Chocolatey packages. Although I’ve been a Windows user for many years, I never touched PowerShell before. What I’m going to do is to use PowerShell to move the package to a new location, remove the old package and register the destination directory to the environment path.
PowerShell Dev Tools
- Visual Studio Code
- Windows PowerShell ISE
How to Move Chocolatey Packages
To make the script work, we have to solve some problems.
How to get the PowerShell version?
PowerShell version is important because we need to check the corresponding documentation.
$PSVersionTable.PSVersion
How to run PowerShell scripts?
The first step is to start Windows PowerShell as administrator.
When running ps1 file at the first time, you may get the following error:
ps1 cannot be loaded because running scripts is disabled on this system.
The reason is the default execution policy is Restricted:
# Check the default policy Get-ExecutionPolicy
Change the policy to RemoteSigned:
Set-ExecutionPolicy RemoteSigned
How to combine multiple strings into a file path?
Use Join-Path to combine a path with a child path. If you want to create a path with multiple child paths, use pipeline:
$envPath = Join-Path $destinationDir -ChildPath $appName | Join-Path -ChildPath $binaryFolder
How to throw exceptions and terminate the script when we get some errors?
If there is an exception, the script will be automatically terminated, which is not user-friendly. We can use “try catch” to capture the exception, print the error information and then exit the process:
try {
$destinationDir = Join-Path $partition -ChildPath "chocolatey" -ErrorAction Stop
}
catch {
$exception = $_
Write-Output $exception
Exit 1
}
How to create a new directory?
If a directory does not exist, create it:
if (![System.IO.Directory]::Exists($destinationDir)) {
[System.IO.Directory]::CreateDirectory($destinationDir)
}
How to tell if a string contains a substring?
if ($environmentVariables.Contains($envPath)) {
// TODO:
}
How to set environment variables?
According to the online tutorial, we can permanently update the environment path as follows:
$environmentVariables = [Environment]::GetEnvironmentVariable("Path", "Machine")
$environmentVariables = "$envPath;" + $environmentVariables
[Environment]::SetEnvironmentVariable("Path", $environmentVariables, "Machine")
- “Path” is the system environment variable.
- “$environmentVariables” is the value to be assigned to “Path”.
- “Machine” is the machine-level. Alternatively, you can use “User” and “Process”.
How to install and move a package?
Assume the package is Dynamsoft Barcode Reader:
choco install dbr
Move the package:
.\choco-move.ps1
Source Code
https://github.com/yushulx/move-chocolatey-package
The post Moving Chocolatey Packages with PowerShell appeared first on Code Pool.