MSIX Hero is a freeware tool used by administrators and packagers for troubleshooting, analysis and debugging of MSIX packages. One of the latest updates introduced a new functionality – the ability to edit and create YAML manifests – a format accepted by winget package manager.
Winget is the newest approach from Microsoft, which aims to offer a centralized, format-agnostic package manager. While it differs substantially from what Linux/UNIX package managers and even Chocolatey, Scoop etc. offer, there seems to be rather a positive reception by the community. Once some missing features are there, together with constantly growing number of apps available, it may eventually become a really interesting part of the ecosystem, possibly one of the first thing the user would install to get his beloved apps and stuff on his newly staged computer.
In this blog post, I will show how to get started, create and validate an app definition and finally push it to the repository. Some basic knowledge of git would help you to get started (as the publishing process relies heavily on a proper git-based workflow), but this guide has been written for git beginners in mind. Just make sure you have a free GitHub account – register for a new one if you do not have any yet.
This tutorial is specifically addressed to those, who may not be quite proficient with git and related stuff, but want to still be able to publish submissions to winget. Users working with git on daily basis can certainly skip large parts of sections, describing how to fork and sync repositories.
Preparing
The app that I am going to publish will be the newest version 1.0.5 of MSIX Hero. The app is going to be an update of a previous version which is already in winget, but every submission is more or less following the same steps, regardless of being a completely new app, or just an updated version.
The first step is to prepare the sources. The app must be installable silently (with or without command line switches) and redistributable as a single file. The format itself is less important, most popular choices are:
- MSI (Windows Installer) (note: because the file must be completely standalone, make sure that all your files and CAB archives are compressed inside the MSI container)
- EXE (any format would work, some typical would be setups created by InnoSetup or NSIS).
- MSIX/APPX (preferred choice for the modern deployment).
MSIX Hero is an MSIX app. The steps for other types are mostly the same.
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