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?
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
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).
--no-admin switch (same as -B).
install-pkg seems to have been moved. Though given this answer is 13 years old I'm surprised how gracefully it's aged.
Commented
Feb 28 at 18:06
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
apt-cyg download the packages from?
Commented
Apr 19, 2014 at 19:24
http://mirrors.kernel.org/sourceware/cygwin, as specified in findworkspace(), when you haven't specified the mirror using the command line option -m. If you specify the command line, the mirror server information will be written to /etc/setup/last-mirror.
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.
svn and apt-cyg may be broken. So you may have to use the three step wget approach to install apt-cyg and then replace $mirror/setup... with $mirror/x86_64/setup... in lines 98 and 105 of apt-cyg file.
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
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.
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/
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
Other answers are missing the dependencies you need before you can run the lynx installer within Cygwin. Run this from a privileged powershell or equivalent (your setup executable should be somewhere like Downloads\ or C:\tools\cygwin):
./setup-x86_64.exe -q -P git,vim,curl,wget,zsh,chere,iconv,lynx
After that, you can launch cygwin and install the package manager:
lynx -source rawgit.com/transcode-open/apt-cyg/master/apt-cyg > apt-cyg
install apt-cyg /bin
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.
