Chocolatey is a package manager for Windows. It was designed to be a framework for quickly installing applications and tools that you need asap. It is built on the NuGet infrastructure currently using PowerShell as its focus for delivering packages from source to destination.
Chocolatey is a single, unified interface designed to easily work with all aspects of managing Windows software (installers, 3rd party software etc.…) using a packaging framework that understands both versioning and dependency requirements.
Chocolatey packages encapsulate everything required to manage a particular piece of software into one deployment artifact by wrapping installers, executables, zips, and scripts into a compiled package file.
Chocolatey packages can be used independently, but also integrate with configuration managers like SCCM, Puppet, and Chef.
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Chocolatey is trusted by businesses all over the world to manage their software deployments on Windows.
You can host your own sources and add them to Chocolatey, you can extend Chocolatey’s capabilities, and folks, it’s only going to get better.
According to the site, “Chocolatey packages are not just fancy zip files with PowerShell, they understand versioning and dependencies, allowing you to encapsulate everything related to managing installation and configuration for a piece of software.”
With all of this in mind, think of Chocolatey as a framework that you can build on top of. Chef, Puppet, PowerShell DSC, Ansible, etc. all have ways for using Chocolatey to ensure the state of a computer and packages installed. Even Microsoft has decided to use Chocolatey’ s framework with the PowerShell Package Management.
Official Chocalatey Website - https://chocolatey.org/