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 commandline?

Answer 1

Install apt-cyg:

wget http://apt-cyg.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/apt-cyg
chmod +x apt-cyg
mv apt-cyg /usr/local/bin/

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

apt-cyg install lynx

Answer 2

The official apt-cyg installation method is:

# svn --force export http://apt-cyg.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/ /bin/
# chmod +x /bin/apt-cyg

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 3

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 4

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 5

Old question, but for others that google and got here: Official setup.exe 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.exe --no-desktop --no-shortcuts --no-startmenu --quiet-mode --root "%cd%" --packages %*

You need to download and put http://www.cygwin.com/setup.exe into the same directory. Now all you have to do to install package is:

install-pkg packagename

Positive: official setup.exe, should always work, for any package. Negative: current (june/2011) official setup.exe requires administrator rights even though it actually does not need one (e.g. root directory outside system folders).

Answer 6

Inspired by user17633 and peenut

setup.exe -n -q -s ftp://lug.mtu.edu/cygwin -P curl,git,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/