Installing additional packages for Cygwin

Question

To install additional packages for Cygwin, do I just need to run the setup.exe again and choose from the packages list?

Also, doing this won't harm my computer in terms of 2 Cygwin instances being installed or problems of that kind (I'm kind of a noobie with these things).

Last, there is no package manager in Cygwin which you can run in the command line? Something similar to Pip in Python.

Answer 1

No, adding additional packages doesn’t modify the current settings. There is a package manager called apt-cyg which installes additional packages from command-line. To install apt-cyg follow the below steps:

wget rawgit.com/transcode-open/apt-cyg/master/apt-cyg
install apt-cyg /bin

Note: wget should be installed for downloading the apt-cyg. To Use apt-cyg for installing additional package (after following the above steps):

apt-cyg install ncurses

Answer 2

Additional option, may be helpful for someone:

To install additional packages in windows from windows command line you can use your cygwin installer.
I suppose, you've already downloaded it to install cygwin from here https://cygwin.com/install.html.

$ setup-x86_64.exe -q -P graphviz

see this guide for details: http://preshing.com/20141108/how-to-install-the-latest-gcc-on-windows/

Answer 3

No, it doesn't hurt the current setup. The install program knows what's installed already.

Having said that, I long ago got into the habit of installing all of Cygwin since, despite its size, it's still minuscule compared to the size of modern hard disks. That way, you won't ever have to worry about whether a package is installed or not.

Answer 4

There is no package management in Cygwin outside of the setup program. The setup only applies updates to your current installation, it does not overwrite packages than what you already have.

So if you want new packages just rerun the setup program to install packages.

Answer 5

You can just look for the package binaries and decompress them in the C:\cygwin\bin folder. I did that for dos2unix ( https://cygwin.com/packages/summary/dos2unix.html ) and trying it out now.

Answer 6

Re-run the setup executable like "cygwin_setup-x86_64.exe" should do it.

1. "Install from Internet"
2. Accept your existing root directory (from your existing installation)
3. Use your existing "Local Package Directory"
4. On the screen, view "Full"
5. Search for the new package you want to add
6. Go through the installation