Celebrating Our 13th Year

This day, 13 years ago, Chocolatey CLI was born with the first commit made to GitHub. The first version of Chocolatey CLI, 0.6.0, was released just a few days later.

Back then, the Chocolatey Community Repository didn’t exist, so it was published to the NuGet.org repository. A few months later, in August 2011, the Chocolatey Community Repository was born, and version 0.7.0.0 of Chocolatey ClI was officially published.

To date, there have been 1,311 downloads of that package version, whereas there have now been 20,820,768 downloads of the most recent package version, 2.2.2. It has been amazing to watch the growth of Chocolatey over the years!

Community Repository Downloads

Continuing with the tradition that has been set in our previous yearly blog posts (2021, 2022), we thought we would start by looking at the downloads from the Chocolatey Community Repository.

The Chocolatey Community Repository is the largest repository of Windows packages available. Up from 471M downloads in 2022, we saw an increase of 123M downloads in 2023 taking us to 594M for the year.

Year on year we are seeing an increasing number of downloads for the packages that are maintained by the Chocolatey Community. It is only once you see the numbers in this type of format that you begin to appreciate the scale of the project. Thank you to all the package maintainers, package moderators, and the wider Chocolatey Community, for making this happen!

Product Releases

Last year saw us releasing more product versions than all previous years. Up from 39 in 2022, we released 68 product versions last year, including:

• Chocolatey CLI.
• Chocolatey Licensed Extension.
• Chocolatey Central Management.
• Chocolatey Agent.
• Chocolatey GUI.
• Chocolatey GUI Licensed Extension.
• Chocolatey For Business Azure Environment.
• Chocolatey Ansible Collection.
• Boxstarter.
• cChoco.

Contained within that number of Product releases were a good number of alpha/beta releases. As we moved forward with the

• switch to .NET Framework 4.8,
• updating to use the latest NuGet.Client libraries,
• support for NuGet v3 repositories,

we wanted to make sure that everything was working as expected, as this was done through the release of these alpha/beta packages.

A huge thank you to everyone who helped with testing these packages, and providing feedback on how they were working!

NOTE: This year, we changed the way in which we counted the Product releases slightly, so anyone looking back on the previous years blog post will notice some differences in totals for the year.

The Last Year

This year has been a particularly busy year for the Chocolatey Team, and we wanted to shared some of the highlights with you:

• We released a major version of each of the core Chocolatey products (Chocolatey CLI, Chocolatey Licensed Extension, Chocolatey Agent, Chocolatey GUI and Chocolatey GUI Licensed Extension).
  • This was a major undertaking by the team. Check out the release blog post for full details.
• Chocolatey Central Management Deployments is a feature that our customers continue to be the most excited about. Adding the ability to import a Deployment Plan, as well as create Deployment Plans from different contexts (Group, Computer, and Software), has given users much more flexibility when creating Deployment Plans.
• Over the past 12 months, we have produced 17 distinct videos on our YouTube channel as part of our monthly Product Spotlight and Coffee Break livestreams. These videos cover a range of topics, including discussions of recent releases and upcoming changes, as well as interviews with members of the Chocolatey Team and Community Moderators.

The Future

The focus for the remainder of this year is going to be improvements to the Chocolatey Community Repository, and the associated Package Moderation Services. There have been some long standing issues here that the team are very much looking forward to shipping solutions for!

Our customers, and community, drive us and our products. We are grateful to our community and our customers and we do not take for granted the support we receive, every single day.

Thank you for being part of our journey to 13!