Where is the cygwin setup.exe binary when installed with the Chocolatey package manager?

Question

I am working on a system automation process which will use Powershell to install Chocolatey to install Cygwin. I would subsequently like to install the prerequisites for apt-cyg, which will allow me to programatically install packages from cygwin. However, I do not know where the setup.exe binary for Cygwin is placed when installed with Chocolatey.

Answer 1

I downloaded the cygwin package and inspected the chocolateyInstall.ps1. Looks like the package downloads the exe installer and passes the target folder.

$binRoot = Get-BinRoot
$cygRoot = join-path $binRoot "cygwin"
$cygPackages = join-path $cygRoot packages

# https://cygwin.com/faq/faq.html#faq.setup.cli
$silentArgs = "-q -R $cygRoot -l $cygPackages -s http://mirrors.kernel.org/sourceware/cygwin/"
$validExitCodes = @(0)

Install-ChocolateyPackage "$packageName" "$installerType" "$silentArgs" "$url" "$url64"  -validExitCodes $validExitCodes

The target folder is combined using the Chocolatey "binroot" folder. Here's where this gets messy... There are a bunch of legacy locations for this folder. The foolproof method is to import the Chocolatey helper module and execute Get-BinRoot. You need to find your Chocolatey install folder, too.

PS> Import-Module $ENV:CHOCOLATEYINSTALL\chocolateyInstall\helpers\chocolateyInstaller.psm1; Get-BinRoot

That will dump a folder name, on my system (and most systems with the latest Chocolatey and no manual changes to that path or any other Environment variables)

C:\tools

So, the cygwin binaries should be under some path like

C:\tools\cygwin

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FYI, the cygwin package does recommend installing the cyg-get package for this kind of thing.

Answer 2

It's not an answer to where you can find the setup.exe, but you can actually use some package manager for Cygwin to manage packages. Some of them are standalone applications or scripts, some of them are just wrappers around Cygwin's setup.exe. Check my answer to How do I install cygwin components from the command line? for a list of some of them.

Also, there is the cyg-get in the Chocolatey's repository, which is, in fact, a wrapper around the setup.exe written in PowerShell.