Upgrading and installing packages through the Cygwin command-line?

Question

I'm a blind computer user that uses Cygwin.

The installation program isn't very accessible: upgrading, installing, and removing specific packages is quite hard to do since you have to use simulated mouse keystrokes to click and scroll.

Is there a way to either manually install/upgrade packages or install/upgrade them through the command-line?

Answer 1

Install apt-cyg:

lynx -source https://raw.githubusercontent.com/transcode-open/apt-cyg/master/apt-cyg > apt-cyg
install apt-cyg /bin

After that you'll be able to install say the package "lynx" including dependencies by running:

apt-cyg install lynx

Answer 2

Since some people correctly stated that apt-cyg itself needs wget and in order to get apt-cyg you need wget, there is a bash only solution to bootstrap wget in pure bash.

Create a function like this in your mintty bash shell:

function __wget() {
    : ${DEBUG:=0}
    local URL=$1
    local tag="Connection: close"
    local mark=0

    if [ -z "${URL}" ]; then
        printf "Usage: %s \"URL\" [e.g.: %s http://www.google.com/]" \
               "${FUNCNAME[0]}" "${FUNCNAME[0]}"
        return 1;
    fi
    read proto server path <<<$(echo ${URL//// })
    DOC=/${path// //}
    HOST=${server//:*}
    PORT=${server//*:}
    [[ x"${HOST}" == x"${PORT}" ]] && PORT=80
    [[ $DEBUG -eq 1 ]] && echo "HOST=$HOST"
    [[ $DEBUG -eq 1 ]] && echo "PORT=$PORT"
    [[ $DEBUG -eq 1 ]] && echo "DOC =$DOC"

    exec 3<>/dev/tcp/${HOST}/$PORT
    echo -en "GET ${DOC} HTTP/1.1\r\nHost: ${HOST}\r\n${tag}\r\n\r\n" >&3
    while read line; do
        [[ $mark -eq 1 ]] && echo $line
        if [[ "${line}" =~ "${tag}" ]]; then
            mark=1
        fi
    done <&3
    exec 3>&-
}

Now you can use it almost like wget:

__wget http://apt-cyg.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/apt-cyg > /usr/bin/apt-cyg && chmod 0755 /usr/bin/apt-cyg

Answer 3

The official apt-cyg installation method is:

lynx -source rawgit.com/transcode-open/apt-cyg/master/apt-cyg > apt-cyg
install apt-cyg /bin

Two steps is better than three. Then:

apt-cyg install nano

By the way, to make it work you will need to install wget, tar, gawk and bzip2 in order to use apt-cyg. Apart from wget, the others come with default Cygwin installation.

Answer 4

Old question, but for others that google and got here: Official setup has command line arguments which allowed me to prepare simple *.bat script - just put following line in e.g. "install-pkg.bat" and put that file into your root directory (e.g. C:\cygwin):

setup-x86.exe --no-desktop --no-shortcuts --no-startmenu --quiet-mode --root "%cd%" --packages %*

You need to download and put http://www.cygwin.com/setup-x86.exe (32bit) or http://www.cygwin.com/setup-x86_64.exe (64bit) into the same directory. Now all you have to do to install package is:

install-pkg packagename

Positive: official setup, should always work, for any package. Negative: current (june/2015) official setup requires administrator rights even though it actually does not need one (e.g. root directory outside system folders).

Answer 5

Cygwin's setup.exe, at least in the 1.7 "beta" release, has an "unattended" mode built-in. Drag and drop your setup.exe shortcut into a command window (or otherwise prepare to run it with switches), and add -q for unattended mode followed by -P and comma-separated package names. So, for me, this installed lynx:

$ "C:\Documents and Settings\martind\Desktop\setup-1.7.exe" -q -P lynx

Answer 6

setup-x86 -nq -s http://box-soft.com -P curl,git,make

or

setup-x86 -nq -s http://box-soft.com -P curl -P git -P make

This will install cURL, git, and make, with no shortcuts in quiet mode.

Answer 7

I found two 'apt like' package managers for cygwin. One is a python script called cyg-apt which you can download from http://www.lilypond.org/~janneke/software/cyg-apt and the other is apt-cyg which you can find at http://code.google.com/p/apt-cyg/

Answer 8

There is a chicken <=> egg problem with the accepted answer. If you didn't get wget or lynx during the initial install, you cannot use apt-cyg. Here is how I installed wget so that I could use apt-cyg. (It uses the CLI features of the cygwin setup exe.)

# check to see if you are running 64 bit cygwin
$ uname -a
CYGWIN_NT-10.0 WINDOWS-ABMESEI 2.6.0(0.304/5/3) 2016-08-31 14:32 x86_64 Cygwin

# if you are not using 64 bit, get http://www.cygwin.com/setup-x86.exe instead of...
$ curl -o cygwin-setup.exe http://www.cygwin.com/setup-x86_64.exe
$ chmod +x cygwin-setup.exe

# now you are ready to use it according to: https://cygwin.com/faq/faq.html#faq.setup.cli
$ cygwin-setup.exe --no-desktop --no-shortcuts --no-startmenu --quiet-mode --packages wget

Answer 9

For at least packages that do not require post-install configuration, I have simply untarred them from the cygwin root '/'. I required an older version of subversion (1.7.14) which had passed beyond the two versions handled by setup.

An additional advantage is the package becomes outside the cygwin package management world and thus in a kind of adhoc blacklist is not automatically updated with the newest package if defaults are kept.