This One Goes To 11! Celebrating 11 Years Of Chocolatey.

Eleven years ago today the start of Chocolatey was born. Way back then, Rob Reynolds, founder of Chocolatey Software, Inc. committed the first lines of code with the simple goal of offering a universal package manager for Windows. Eleven years later and we have a fantastic community and both a commercial and open-source toolset.

Community Repository Downloads

Over the years the downloads from the Chocolatey Community Repository have really accelerated! In 2015, we saw an increase of almost 50 million downloads. But that was surpassed in 2019 by an increase of over 180 million downloads!

To help us manage the load and help sustain the Community Repository for the community, we implemented Rate Limiting in September 2019. This reduced the downloads in subsequent years as organizations set up Chocolatey for their internal use.

Product Releases

Over the last 11 years we have released 238 product versions, not including pre-releases. That’s just over 21 per year on average!

In the early years there was a flurry of activity while the core features of Chocolatey CLI and Chocolatey GUI were added. 2015 to 2016 saw the new Chocolatey Licensed Extension, following on with Chocolatey Agent in 2017. In 2020 Chocolatey Central Management was born and Boxstarter moved to the Chocolatey organization.

Since 2020 the number of stable versions released has increased. This year we are on track to surpass that again with 15 in the first quarter of 2022 alone.

Our History

Since the blog post celebrating 5 years of Chocolatey back in 2016, there have been many notable changes such as:

• A new Chocolatey logo.
• The first ever Chocolatey Fest!
• Managing your Chocolatey packages with Microsoft Intune integration.
• Chocolatey For Business Azure Environment was created to provide an easy way to get up and running with Chocolatey For Business, quickly.
• One billion installs from the Chocolatey Community Repository.

There are many more events in our long history. To know where you are going, you need to know where you have come from, and we have created a timeline to remind us of that.

Milestone Releases

To celebrate 11 years of Chocolatey, we are today releasing major versions of a number of products:

• Chocolatey CLI v1.0.0.
• Chocolatey Licensed Extension v4.0.0.
• Chocolatey Agent v1.0.0.
• Chocolatey GUI v1.0.0.
• Chocolatey GUI Licensed Extension v1.0.0.

The Future

This has been a long journey. We are extremely grateful to our community and our customers and humbled by the amazing support we receive every single day.

The Chocolatey Community Repository would not be where it is today without the early community pioneers. And it would not be going from strength to strength without our strong community of package maintainers and moderators.

And Chocolatey would not be where it is today without that dream of a universal package manager for Windows.

Thank you for the last 11 years. It’s been fun. Here’s to the next 11!