Welcome to the Windows Package Manager Manifest Creator repository.

This repository contains the source code for the Windows Package Manager Manifest Creator. The Windows Package Manager Manifest Creator is designed to help generate or update manifest files for the Community repo.

Overview

Windows Package Manager Manifest Creator is an Open Source tool designed to help developers create, update, and submit manifest files to the Windows Package Manager repository.

Developers will use this tool to submit their applications for use with the Windows Package Manager.

Getting Started

For your convenience, WingetCreate can be acquired a number of ways.

Install from the github repo

The Windows Package Manager Manifest Creator is available for download from the winget-create repository. To install the package, simply click the the MSIX file in your browser. Once it has downloaded, click open.

Install with Windows Package Manager

winget install wingetcreate

Install with Scoop

scoop install wingetcreate

Install with Chocolatey

choco install wingetcreate

Build status

Using Windows Package Manager Manifest Creator

WingetCreate has the following commands:

Command	Description
New	Command for creating a new manifest from scratch
Update	Command for updating an existing manifest
New-Locale	Command for creating a new locale for an existing manifest
Update-Locale	Command for updating a locale for an existing manifest
Submit	Command for submitting an existing PR
Show	Command for displaying existing manifests
Token	Command for managing cached GitHub personal access tokens
Settings	Command for editing the settings file configurations
Cache	Command for managing downloaded installers stored in cache
Info	Displays information about the client
-?	Displays command line help

Click on the individual commands to learn more.

Using Windows Package Manager Manifest Creator in a CI/CD pipeline

You can use WingetCreate to update your existing app manifest as part of your CI/CD pipeline. For reference, see the final task in this repo's release Azure pipeline. If you are utilizing GitHub Actions as your CI pipeline, you can refer to the following repositories that have implemented WingetCreate within their release pipelines:

• DevHome
• Oh-My-Posh
• PowerToys
• Terminal

You can also check out this episode of Open at Microsoft where we cover the same topic.

Using the standalone exe:

The latest version of the standalone exe can be found at https://aka.ms/wingetcreate/latest, and the latest preview version can be found at https://aka.ms/wingetcreate/preview, both of these require .NET Runtime 8.0 to be installed on the build machine. To install this on your build machine in your pipeline, you can include the following dotnet task:

- task: UseDotNet@2
  displayName: "Install .NET Runtime"
  inputs:
    packageType: sdk
    version: "8.x"
    installationPath: '$(ProgramFiles)\dotnet'

Or you can utilize a PowerShell task and run the following script.

    Invoke-WebRequest https://dot.net/v1/dotnet-install.ps1 -OutFile dotnet-install.ps1
    .\dotnet-install.ps1 -Runtime dotnet -Architecture x64 -Version 8 -InstallDir $env:ProgramFiles\dotnet

Important

Make sure your build machine has the Microsoft Visual C++ Redistributable for Visual Studio already installed. Without this, the standalone WingetCreate exe will fail to execute and likely show a "DllNotFoundException" error.

To execute the standalone exe, add another PowerShell task to download and run the ./wingetcreate.exe to update your existing manifest. You will need a GitHub personal access token if you would like to submit your updated manifest. It is not recommended to hardcode your PAT in your script as this poses as a security threat. You should instead store your PAT as a secret pipeline variable or a repository secret in case of GitHub Actions.

    Invoke-WebRequest https://aka.ms/wingetcreate/latest -OutFile wingetcreate.exe
    .\wingetcreate.exe update <packageId> -u $(packageUrls) -v $(manifestVersion) -t $(GITHUB_PAT)

Using the msixbundle:

Windows Server 2022 now supports App Execution Aliases, which means the alias wingetcreate can be used to run the tool after installing the msixbundle. The latest version of the msixbundle can be found at https://aka.ms/wingetcreate/latest/msixbundle. Similar to the standalone exe steps, download the msixbundle, add the package, and run wingetcreate to update your manifest.

Important

Winget-Create has a dependency on the C++ Runtime Desktop framework package. Be sure to also download and install this package prior to installing wingetcreate as shown in the steps below.

- powershell: |
    # Download and install C++ Runtime framework package.
    iwr https://aka.ms/Microsoft.VCLibs.x64.14.00.Desktop.appx -OutFile $(vcLibsBundleFile)
    Add-AppxPackage $(vcLibsBundleFile)

    # Download Winget-Create msixbundle, install, and execute update.
    iwr https://aka.ms/wingetcreate/latest/msixbundle -OutFile $(appxBundleFile)
    Add-AppxPackage $(appxBundleFile)
    wingetcreate update Microsoft.WingetCreate -u $(packageUrl) -v $(manifestVersion) -t $(GITHUB_PAT) --submit

The CLI also supports creating or updating manifests with multiple installer URLs. You can either create new manifests with multiple installer nodes using the New Command or update existing manifests with multiple installer URLs using the Update Command.

GitHub Personal Access Token (classic) Permissions

When creating your own GitHub Personal Access Token (PAT) to be used with WingetCreate, make sure the following permissions are selected.

• Select the public_repo scope to allow access to public repositories

• (Optional) Select the delete_repo scope permission if you want WingetCreate to automatically delete the forked repo that it created if the PR submission fails.

Building the client

Prerequisites

You can install the prerequisites in one of two ways:

Using the configuration file

1. Clone the repository
2. Configure your system
   • Please use the configuration file. This can be applied by either:
     • Dev Home's machine configuration tool
     • WinGet configuration. If you have WinGet version v1.6.2631 or later, run winget configure .configurations/configuration.dsc.yaml in an elevated shell from the project root so relative paths resolve correctly
   • Alternatively, if you already are running the minimum OS version, have Visual Studio installed, and have developer mode enabled, you may configure your Visual Studio directly via the .vsconfig file. To do this:
     • Open the Visual Studio Installer, select “More” on your product card and then "Import configuration"
     • Specify the .vsconfig file at the root of the repo and select “Review Details”

Manual set up

• Windows 10 1709 (16299) or later
• Developer mode enabled
• Visual Studio 2022
  • Or use winget to install it ;) (although you may need to adjust the workloads via Tools -> Get Tools and Features...)
• Git Large File Storage (LFS)
• The following VS workloads, individual components and extensions:
  • .NET Desktop Development (Workload)
  • Windows application development (Workload)
  • MSVC - VS2022 C++ ARM64/ARM64EC build tools (Latest) (Individual component)
  • Windows 11 SDK (10.0.26100.0) (Individual component)
  • Microsoft Visual Studio Installer Projects 2022 (Extension)

Building

Open winget-create\src\WingetCreateCLI.sln in Visual Studio and build. We currently only build using the solution; command-line methods of building a VS solution should work as well.

Testing the client

Running Unit and E2E Tests

Running unit and E2E tests are a great way to ensure that functionality is preserved across major changes. You can run these tests in Visual Studio Test Explorer.

Testing Prerequisites

• Fork the winget-pkgs-submission-test repository

• Fill out the test parameters in the WingetCreateTests/Test.runsettings file

  • WingetPkgsTestRepoOwner: The repository owner of the winget-pkgs-submission-test repo. (Repo owner must be forked from main "winget-pkgs-submission-test" repo)
  • WingetPkgsTestRepo: The winget-pkgs test repository. (winget-pkgs-submission-test)
  • GitHubApiKey: GitHub personal access token for testing.
    • Instructions on how to generate your own GitHubApiKey.
    • Direct link to GitHub Personal Access Tokens page.
  • GitHubAppPrivateKey: Leave blank, this is only used by the build server.

• Set the solution-wide runsettings file for the tests

  • Go to Test menu > Configure Run Settings -> Select Solution Wide runsettings File -> Choose your configured runsettings file

Caution

You should treat your access token like a password. To avoid exposing your PAT, be sure to reset changes to the WingetCreateTests/Test.runsettings file before committing your changes. You can also use the command git update-index --skip-worktree src/WingetCreateTests/WingetCreateTests/Test.runsettings command to untrack changes to the file and prevent it from being committed.

Contributing

This project welcomes contributions and suggestions. Most contributions require you to agree to a Contributor License Agreement (CLA) declaring that you have the right to, and actually do, grant us the rights to use your contribution. For details, visit https://cla.opensource.microsoft.com. More information is available in our CONTRIBUTING.md file.

When you submit a pull request, a CLA bot will automatically determine whether you need to provide a CLA and decorate the PR appropriately (e.g., status check, comment). Simply follow the instructions provided by the bot. You will only need to do this once across all repos using our CLA.

This project has adopted the Microsoft Open Source Code of Conduct. For more information, please refer to the Code of Conduct FAQ or contact [email protected] with any additional questions or comments.

Data/Telemetry

The wingetcreate.exe client is instrumented to collect usage and diagnostic (error) data and sends it to Microsoft to help improve the product.

If you build the client yourself the instrumentation will not be enabled and no data will be sent to Microsoft.

The wingetcreate.exe client respects machine wide privacy settings and users can opt-out on their device, as documented in the Microsoft Windows privacy statement here.

In short to opt-out, do one of the following:

Windows 11: Go to Start, then select Settings > Privacy & security > Diagnostics & feedback > Diagnostic data and unselect Send optional diagnostic data.

Windows 10: Go to Start, then select Settings > Privacy > Diagnostics & feedback, and select Required diagnostic data.

You can also opt-out of telemetry by configuring the settings.json file and setting the telemetry.disabled field to true. More information can be found in our Settings Command documentation

See the privacy statement for more details.

Known Issues

Certain functionalities of wingetcreate, particularly input prompting, may not be fully supported on certain shells such as PowerShell ISE. The supported shells for the prompting package utilized by wingetcreate are specified here