Use this command to install Windows Package Manager Manifest Creator:
winget install --id=Microsoft.WingetCreate -e
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.
Windows Package Manager Manifest Creator is a command-line tool designed to help developers create, update, and submit manifest files for the Windows Package Manager repository.
Key Features:
Manifest Creation: Automatically generates valid manifests for new packages.
Update Support: Easily updates existing manifests with new versions or metadata.
Validation: Built-in validation ensures manifests meet Windows Package Manager requirements before submission.
Cross-Platform Compatibility: Works on Windows, Linux, and macOS via winget installation.
Open Source: Community-driven development encourages collaboration and transparency.
README
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.
Ideal for software developers and package maintainers to streamline the creation and management of package manifests, ensuring efficient distribution through the Windows Package Manager ecosystem.
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:
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 6.0 to be installed on the build machine. To install this on your build machine in your pipeline, you can include the following dotnet task:
> [!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.
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.
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
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
Clone the repository
Configure your system
Configure your system using the configuration file. To run the configuration, use winget configure .config/configuration.winget from the project root or you can double-click the file directly from the file explorer.
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”
Windows 11 SDK (10.0.22000.0) (Tools -> Get Tools and Features -> Individual Components)
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.
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)
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
Set up your github token:
[Recommended] Run wingetcreate token -s to go through the Github authentication flow
Or create a personal access token with the repo permission and set it as an environment variable WINGET_CREATE_GITHUB_TOKEN. (This option is more convenient for CI/CD pipelines.)
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.
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
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
