winget missing from windows 11 (10.0.22000.65)

[BladeFireLight]

multiple sorces and a few people in the insiders at work show off winget on windows 11.

I just installed the current dev and it's not present. will winget make it into the final of win11?

[jedieaston]

Try opening the Microsoft Store and checking for updates. Also, the current build number is 10.0.22000.168, so you probably need to run Windows Update.

[BladeFireLight]

I am in the beta channel.. no updates showing for windows.

store updates all done and no winget

[jedieaston]

Ah, the beta channel. I wonder if you have to be in dev to get winget?

[BladeFireLight]

I do not believe so. my co workers around me all got it. and I did not.

[jedieaston]

Can you look in your App Execution Aliases and see if it appears there?

These instructions should work: https://www.windowscentral.com/how-manage-app-execution-aliases-windows-10

Also, what edition of Windows are you on? Shouldn't matter, but just to be sure...

[BladeFireLight]

I do not see it in the aliases list.

edition says Windows 11 Enterprise

[denelon]

The "App Installer" from the store should include the Windows Package Manager on all versions of Windows 11. It didn't make it into the initial Windows 11 install, but an update should be available for all Windows Insider builds.

[BladeFireLight]

I have installed all updates and so see an app installer winstore app and now the aliases have app insaller pointing to python and python3

still no winget from the command line

[jedieaston]

Do you have any pending updates in the Microsoft Store?

[BladeFireLight]

nope

[denelon]

Are you logged on with a user account that has admin rights on the machine?

Is it the same user account that installed the Windows Package Manager?

[BladeFireLight]

Yes and yes

[denelon]

Thanks, I've contacted a couple of other internal teams to see what other steps we can take to troubleshoot what might be happening. I'd like to isolate whether the problem is related to the Windows Package Manager, MSIX installation, or something else. I haven't been able to reproduce this in any of my environments yet.

[BladeFireLight]

could it be something as simple as a missing Path entry?

[jedieaston]

It could be.

Can you see if there is a winget.exe file in %LOCALAPPDATA\Microsoft\WindowsApps?

[aminya]

Still no winget.

In this comment, it was mentioned that

One of the initial goals is to make sure the Windows Package Manager works on earlier versions of Windows without a PowerShell dependency. That is one of the primary reasons this is a .exe and written in C++.

If this is a C++ executable, why is it so hard to install and put it on the path?

[jedieaston]

Because it's packaged with the App Installer as a UWP app, which does other stuff.

They just pushed it to the stable ring, have you seen anything in the Microsoft Store in the last day or so?

[aminya]

I updated the Microsoft package, but I still didn't get winget in my shell. I found this note in the troubleshooting.

The App Installer did not automatically add the PATH environment variable. You should add the path environment variable. The value to add is "%userprofile%\AppData\Local\Microsoft\WindowsApps".

Adding that path to my PATH finally fixes the problem. Not sure why it was not added automatically!

[jedieaston]

That's weird. It's good that you got it working though!

[denelon]

@aminya I'm glad you got it working as well. We've had a few cases where other programs modified the path entry, but nothing solid enough to completely isolate it so we can make the fix.

[franklesniak]

Is there a way to synchronously install App Installer? If not, there needs to be!

With winget not being available immediately out of the box in Windows 11, I don't see sysadmins adopting it because they won't be able to use it during OS deployment, autopilot, etc.

In the absence of winget being included in the ISO for Windows 11, we need a process like:

1. Install OS
2. Run some command(s) to install App Installer. The command is synchronous (it waits until App Installer is installed and returns an error code if it fails to install)
3. Assume it's safe to call winget

More discussion: https://twitter.com/FrankLesniak/status/1448294637941280774?s=20

[jazzdelightsme]

There is some script code to do exactly that here: #1738 (reply in thread)

[ghost]

@BladeFireLight this issue has been automatically marked as stale because it has been marked as requiring author feedback but has not had any activity for 7 days. It will be closed if no further activity occurs within 7 days of this comment.

[franklesniak]

Keeping the party going by mentioning that I posted to Feedback Hub: https://aka.ms/AAe2dpu

[denelon]

The Windows Package Manager should be in an automatic update delivered by the Microsoft Store on Windows 11. It was not included in the base image for the initial release. If Group Policy or other settings are blocking the Microsoft Store, this could affect a user's ability to use the Microsoft Store UI to request the update.

[jazzdelightsme]

Sometimes one wants to be able to programmatically and synchronously get those Store updates. This is a bit challenging, but can be done. Hat tip to @dmachaj for coming up with this; I'm just sharing the knowledge.

<#
.SYNOPSIS
    Synchronously triggers store updates for a select set of apps. You should run this in
    legacy powershell.exe, as some of the code has problems in pwsh on older OS releases.
#>
[CmdletBinding()]
param()

try
{
    if ($PSVersionTable.PSVersion.Major -ne 5)
    {
        throw "This script has problems in pwsh on some platforms; please run it with legacy Windows PowerShell (5.1) (powershell.exe)."
    }

    # https://fleexlab.blogspot.com/2018/02/using-winrts-iasyncoperation-in.html
    Add-Type -AssemblyName System.Runtime.WindowsRuntime
    $asTaskGeneric = ([System.WindowsRuntimeSystemExtensions].GetMethods() | ? { $_.Name -eq 'AsTask' -and $_.GetParameters().Count -eq 1 -and $_.GetParameters()[0].ParameterType.Name -eq 'IAsyncOperation`1' })[0]
    function Await($WinRtTask, $ResultType) {
        $asTask = $asTaskGeneric.MakeGenericMethod($ResultType)
        $netTask = $asTask.Invoke($null, @($WinRtTask))
        $netTask.Wait(-1) | Out-Null
        $netTask.Result
    }

    # https://docs.microsoft.com/uwp/api/windows.applicationmodel.store.preview.installcontrol.appinstallmanager?view=winrt-22000
    # We need to tell PowerShell about this WinRT API before we can call it...
    Write-Host "Enabling Windows.ApplicationModel.Store.Preview.InstallControl.AppInstallManager WinRT type"
    [Windows.ApplicationModel.Store.Preview.InstallControl.AppInstallManager,Windows.ApplicationModel.Store.Preview,ContentType=WindowsRuntime] | Out-Null
    $appManager = New-Object -TypeName Windows.ApplicationModel.Store.Preview.InstallControl.AppInstallManager

    # Customize this list of apps to suit... the key one for making sure that winget.exe is
    # installed is the DesktopAppInstaller one.
    $appsToUpdate = @(
        "Microsoft.WindowsTerminal_8wekyb3d8bbwe",
        "Microsoft.WindowsCalculator_8wekyb3d8bbwe",
        "Microsoft.DesktopAppInstaller_8wekyb3d8bbwe",  # <-- winget comes from this one
        "Microsoft.WindowsNotepad_8wekyb3d8bbwe",
        "Microsoft.Paint_8wekyb3d8bbwe",
        "Microsoft.WindowsFeedbackHub_8wekyb3d8bbwe",
        "MicrosoftWindows.Client.WebExperience_cw5n1h2txyewy",
        "Microsoft.WindowsStore_8wekyb3d8bbwe"
    )

    foreach ($app in $appsToUpdate)
    {
        try
        {
            Write-Host "Requesting an update for $app..."
            $updateOp = $appManager.UpdateAppByPackageFamilyNameAsync($app)
            $updateResult = Await $updateOp ([Windows.ApplicationModel.Store.Preview.InstallControl.AppInstallItem])
            while ($true)
            {
                if ($null -eq $updateResult)
                {
                    Write-Host "Update is null. It must already be completed (or there was no update)..."
                    break
                }

                if ($null -eq $updateResult.GetCurrentStatus())
                {
                    Write-Host "Current status is null. WAT"
                    break
                }

                Write-Host $updateResult.GetCurrentStatus().PercentComplete
                if ($updateResult.GetCurrentStatus().PercentComplete -eq 100)
                {
                    Write-Host "Install completed ($app)"
                    break
                }
                Start-Sleep -Seconds 3
            }
        }
        catch [System.AggregateException]
        {
            # If the thing is not installed, we can't update it. In this case, we get an
            # ArgumentException with the message "Value does not fall within the expected
            # range." I cannot figure out why *that* is the error in the case of "app is
            # not installed"... perhaps we could be doing something different/better, but
            # I'm happy to just let this slide for now.
            $problem = $_.Exception.InnerException # we'll just take the first one
            Write-Host "Error updating app $app : $problem"
            Write-Host "(this is expected if the app is not installed; you can probably ignore this)"
        }
        catch
        {
            Write-Host "Unexpected error updating app $app : $_"
        }
    }

    Write-Host "Store updates completed"

}
catch
{
    Write-Error "Problem updating store apps: $_"
}

[jazzdelightsme]

Forgot to add: after doing that, you may still need to "kick" the DesktopAppInstaller package to make sure that winget.exe is available. Something like:

Add-AppxPackage -RegisterByFamilyName -MainPackage Microsoft.DesktopAppInstaller_8wekyb3d8bbwe

# (you can do similar for wt.exe:)
Add-AppxPackage -RegisterByFamilyName -MainPackage Microsoft.WindowsTerminal_8wekyb3d8bbwe

[jedieaston]

@franklesniak the best solution might be for you to write some PowerShell to pull the latest release from GitHub, install it, and then run whatever commands you want with winget. It'll still catch updates from the Microsoft Store, but since there's no way to tell the Microsoft Store to run updates and get a response when they are done, it's probably the best solution for now.

[franklesniak]

Indeed - thank you both. After I posted last night, I saw another post that said the Windows Store would detect and update App Installer even if someone installed App Installer via Github (https://twitter.com/FrankLesniak/status/1455747254027948032?s=20). I haven't tried this myself, but it sounds like a good path forward.

[ghost]

@BladeFireLight this issue has been automatically marked as stale because it has been marked as requiring author feedback but has not had any activity for 7 days. It will be closed if no further activity occurs within 7 days of this comment.

[GethDeeo]

@jedieaston sorry to hijack this issue, but I'm doing something similar and I have questions: #1691
Provisioning ran just fine, but on first boot the snippet

Write-Host (Get-Date)
while (!(Get-Command -Name winget -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue)) {
  Start-Sleep 5
}
Write-Host (Get-Date)

produces the second timestamp ~15 minutes later (and there is really no winget.exe in %LOCALAPPDATA%\Microsoft\WindowsApps during that time). After that, winget is fully functional in the same ps session.
What is happening in that 15 minutes? Can it be sped up?

[jazzdelightsme]

See this to synchronously get updates: #1738 (reply in thread)

[denelon]

@GethDeeo this isn't likely to change before the next servicing release for Windows 11. We have work scheduled to be included in the base image for the next release.

[GF-Huang]

Bugdows 11

[ItzLevvie]

Have you went to Library > Get updates?

This should update all of the Microsoft Store apps on your device, including App Installer.

[GF-Huang]

But why it not found in CMD?

[ItzLevvie]

WinGet isn't currently pre-installed by default on Windows 11 yet. It's delivered via a Microsoft Store application update.

App Installer is built into Windows 10 and Windows 11 but it's a very old version which doesn't include WinGet so you'll need to press the Get updates button in the Microsoft Store which will allow your device to grab the latest App Installer build.

[jazzdelightsme]

If you need to programmatically get the Store update (instead of clicking in the UI and waiting), see this: #1738 (reply in thread)