First we need to know the cmdlets associated with package management feature in the PowerShell. To get the cmdlets, we can use get-command:

Get-Command -Module packagemanagement

We can see the list of package sources, which comes out of the box for us. For this we can use command:

Get-PackageSource

To get list of software packages installed on local machine, use cmdlet Get-Package. To see list of package providers available for packagemanagement, use cmdlet Get-PackageProvider:

Other than above providers, chocolatey (https://chocolatey.org/) is one other major provider. Now let’s say we need to register chocolatey as a provider. For this we can use below command:

Register-PackageSource -Name chocolatey `
 -Location http://chocolatey.org/api/v2 `
 -Provider PSModule `
 -Trusted `
 -Verbose

To find matching software packages that are available for all package sources, use cmdlet find-package:

Fun thing, if you have chocolatey as provider, you can download and install softwares like google chrome, vlc, firefox, java, adobe reader, winrar and hundreds more.

You can head over to https://chocolatey.org/packages to see list of available package at your disposal. Gone are the days when people used IE to install other browsers. Now we IT Pro can do the same and more using PowerShell. 🙂