WinGet, the Windows Package Manager, is described in Microsoft’s own documentation as “a comprehensive package manager solution that includes” a command-line tool, packaging services for hosting and installing applications, and configuration files. It is Microsoft’s first-party answer to the package managers long standard on Linux and macOS, and it is open source, developed in the open at github.com/microsoft/winget-cli.
Developers use it through the “winget” command in Windows Terminal, PowerShell, or Command Prompt to “discover, install, upgrade, remove and configure a curated set of applications.” A single instruction such as “winget install” fetches and installs an application, replacing the older pattern of visiting many websites and running separate installers by hand.
WinGet draws on two default sources: the WinGet Community Repository, an open-source GitHub repository where software vendors submit package manifests for inclusion, and the Microsoft Store. To keep Store installs secure it applies “certificate pinning” so the client validates it is talking to the genuine Microsoft Store endpoint. The winget-cli project notes the tool ships “a CLI, PowerShell modules, and a COM API.”
By arriving in 2020 as an official, built-in tool, winget gave Windows the kind of scripted, repeatable software management that Chocolatey and others had pioneered on the platform, and that apt and yum had long provided on Unix-like systems.