This repository contains the source code for the Windows Package Manager Manifest Creator. The Windows Package Manager Manifest Creator is designed to help generate or update manifest files for the Community repo.
Windows Package Manager Manifest Creator is an Open Source tool designed to help developers create, update, and submit manifest files to the Windows Package Manager repository.
Developers will use this tool to submit their applications for use with the Windows Package Manager.
For your convenience, WingetCreate can be acquired a number of ways.
Simply run the following command in a command prompt or PowerShell window:
winget install wingetcreateThe Windows Package Manager Manifest Creator is available for download from the winget-create repository. To install the package, download the MSIXBundle package from the release assets. Once it has downloaded, you can simply double-click the file to install it. Alternatively, you can use PowerShell to install the package using the following command:
Add-AppxPackage -Path <Path to the MSIXBundle file>There are also a couple shorthand vanity URLs available to get the latest version of the tool.
- Latest portable package: https://aka.ms/wingetcreate/latest
- Latest MSIX package: https://aka.ms/wingetcreate/latest/msixbundle
Install with Scoop
scoop install wingetcreateInstall with Chocolatey
choco install wingetcreateWingetCreate has the following commands:
| Command | Description |
|---|---|
| New | Command for creating a new manifest from scratch |
| Update | Command for updating an existing manifest |
| New-Locale | Command for creating a new locale for an existing manifest |
| Update-Locale | Command for updating a locale for an existing manifest |
| Submit | Command for submitting an existing PR |
| Show | Command for displaying existing manifests |
| Token | Command for managing cached GitHub personal access tokens |
| Settings | Command for editing the settings file configurations |
| Cache | Command for managing downloaded installers stored in cache |
| Info | Displays information about the client |
| -? | Displays command line help |
Click on the individual commands to learn more.
You can use WingetCreate to update an existing WinGet manifest as part of your CI/CD pipeline. Please note that this requires you to have an existing manifest on the community repository before you can utilize the update pipeline. If you don't have a manifest for your package yet, you can use the New Command to create one & submit it to the community repository.
You can view the GitHub action utilized by this repository to publish the latest release of WinGet-Create to the Windows Package Manager Community repository. For reference, you may also see the following GitHub repositories that utilize a similar approach to update their manifests:
You can also check out this episode of Open at Microsoft where we cover the same topic.
The latest version of the standalone exe can be found at https://aka.ms/wingetcreate/latest, and the latest preview version can be found at https://aka.ms/wingetcreate/preview, both of these require .NET Runtime 8.0 to be installed on the build machine. If your CI runs on GitHub actions, these dependencies would already be installed. For Azure DevOps, you can install the .NET Runtime using the UseDotNet task in your pipeline YAML file.
- task: UseDotNet@2
displayName: 'Install .NET Runtime'
inputs:
packageType: sdk
version: '8.x'
installationPath: '$(ProgramFiles)\dotnet'Or you can utilize a PowerShell task and run the following script.
Invoke-WebRequest https://dot.net/v1/dotnet-install.ps1 -OutFile dotnet-install.ps1
.\dotnet-install.ps1 -Runtime dotnet -Architecture x64 -Version 8.0.14 -InstallDir $env:ProgramFiles\dotnetImportant
Make sure your build machine has the Microsoft Visual C++ Redistributable for Visual Studio already installed. Without this, the standalone WingetCreate exe will fail to execute and likely show a "DllNotFoundException" error.
To execute the standalone exe, add another PowerShell task to download and run the ./wingetcreate.exe to update your existing manifest. You will need a GitHub personal access token if you would like to submit your updated manifest. It is not recommended to hardcode your PAT in your script as this poses as a security threat. You should instead store your PAT as a secret pipeline variable or a repository secret in case of GitHub Actions.
Invoke-WebRequest https://aka.ms/wingetcreate/latest -OutFile wingetcreate.exe
.\wingetcreate.exe update <packageId> -u $(packageUrls) -v $(manifestVersion) -t $(GITHUB_PAT)Windows Server 2022 now supports App Execution Aliases, which means the alias wingetcreate can be used to run the tool after installing the msixbundle. The latest version of the msixbundle can be found at https://aka.ms/wingetcreate/latest/msixbundle. Similar to the standalone exe steps, download the msixbundle, add the package, and run wingetcreate to update your manifest.
Important
Winget-Create has a dependency on the C++ Runtime Desktop framework package. Be sure to also download and install this package prior to installing wingetcreate as shown in the steps below.
- powershell: |
# Download and install C++ Runtime framework package.
iwr https://aka.ms/Microsoft.VCLibs.x64.14.00.Desktop.appx -OutFile $(vcLibsBundleFile)
Add-AppxPackage $(vcLibsBundleFile)When creating your own GitHub Personal Access Token (PAT) to be used with WingetCreate, make sure the following permissions are selected.
- Select the public_repo scope to allow access to public repositories
- (Optional) Select the delete_repo scope permission if you want WingetCreate to automatically delete the forked repo that it created if the PR submission fails.
You can install the prerequisites in one of two ways:
- Clone the repository
- Configure your system
- Configure your system using the configuration file. To run the configuration, use
winget configure .config/configuration.wingetfrom the project root or you can double-click the file directly from the file explorer. - Alternatively, if you already are running the minimum OS version, have Visual Studio installed, and have developer mode enabled, you may configure your Visual Studio directly via the .vsconfig file. To do this:
- Open the Visual Studio Installer, select “More” on your product card and then "Import configuration"
- Specify the .vsconfig file at the root of the repo and select “Review Details”
- Configure your system using the configuration file. To run the configuration, use
- Windows 10 1709 (16299) or later
- Developer mode enabled (optional)
- Visual Studio 2022
- Or use winget to install it ;) (although you may need to adjust the workloads via Tools -> Get Tools and Features...)
- Git Large File Storage (LFS)
- The following workloads:
- .NET Desktop Development
- Universal Windows Platform Development
- Windows 11 SDK (10.0.22000.0) (Tools -> Get Tools and Features -> Individual Components)
Open winget-create\src\WingetCreateCLI.sln in Visual Studio and build. We currently only build using the solution; command line methods of building a VS solution should work as well.
Running unit and E2E tests are a great way to ensure that functionality is preserved across major changes. You can run these tests in Visual Studio Test Explorer.
-
Fill out the test parameters in the
WingetCreateTests/Test.runsettingsfileWingetPkgsTestRepoOwner: The repository owner of the winget-pkgs-submission-test repo. (Repo owner must be forked from main "winget-pkgs-submission-test" repo)WingetPkgsTestRepo: The winget-pkgs test repository. (winget-pkgs-submission-test)
-
Set the solution wide runsettings file for the tests
- Go to
Testmenu >Configure Run Settings->Select Solution Wide runsettings File-> Choose your configured runsettings file
- Go to
-
Set up your github token:
- [Recommended] Run
wingetcreate token -sto go through the Github authentication flow - Or create a personal access token with the
repopermission and set it as an environment variableWINGET_CREATE_GITHUB_TOKEN. (This option is more convenient for CI/CD pipelines.)
- [Recommended] Run
This project welcomes contributions and suggestions. Most contributions require you to agree to a Contributor License Agreement (CLA) declaring that you have the right to, and actually do, grant us the rights to use your contribution. For details, visit https://cla.opensource.microsoft.com. More information is available in our CONTRIBUTING.md file.
When you submit a pull request, a CLA bot will automatically determine whether you need to provide a CLA and decorate the PR appropriately (e.g., status check, comment). Simply follow the instructions provided by the bot. You will only need to do this once across all repos using our CLA.
This project has adopted the Microsoft Open Source Code of Conduct. For more information, please refer to the Code of Conduct FAQ or contact opencode@microsoft.com with any additional questions or comments.
The wingetcreate.exe client is instrumented to collect usage and diagnostic (error) data and sends it to Microsoft to help improve the product.
If you build the client yourself the instrumentation will not be enabled and no data will be sent to Microsoft.
The wingetcreate.exe client respects machine wide privacy settings and users can opt-out on their device, as documented in the Microsoft Windows privacy statement here.
In short to opt-out, do one of the following:
Windows 11: Go to Start, then select Settings > Privacy & security > Diagnostics & feedback > Diagnostic data and unselect Send optional diagnostic data.
Windows 10: Go to Start, then select Settings > Privacy > Diagnostics & feedback, and select Required diagnostic data.
You can also opt-out of telemetry by configuring the settings.json file and setting the telemetry.disabled field to true. More information can be found in our Settings Command documentation
See the privacy statement for more details.
Certain functionalities of wingetcreate, particularly input prompting, may not be fully supported on certain shells such as PowerShell ISE. The supported shells for the prompting package utilized by wingetcreate are specified here