Open Source PowerShell Package Managers for Windows

Vcpkg helps you manage C and C++ libraries on Windows, Linux and MacOS. This tool and ecosystem are constantly evolving, and we always appreciate contributions! After you've gotten vcpkg installed and working, you may wish to add tab completion to your shell. With CMake, you will still need to find_package and the like to use the libraries. Check out the CMake section for more information, including on using CMake with an IDE. In classic mode, vcpkg produces an "installed" tree, whose contents are changed by explicit calls to vcpkg install or vcpkg remove. The installed tree is intended for consumption by any number of projects: for example, installing a bunch of libraries and then using those libraries from Visual Studio, without additional configuration. Because the installed tree is not associated with an individual project, it's similar to tools like brew or apt, except that the installed tree is vcpkg-installation-local, rather than global to a system or user.

The winget-pkgs repository is the community-maintained manifest collection for the Windows Package Manager (winget), serving as the default, upstream source of installable application manifests used by the winget client. It contains tens of thousands of manifest files (organized under a manifests/ folder) plus schema, validation, CI pipelines, and tooling to build, test, and publish packages so users can install software with a single command. The repo enforces contribution processes (including a Contributor License Agreement flow for many contributors), automated validation checks, and publishing pipelines so manifests meet format, checksum, and licensing expectations before becoming available to users. Maintainers document manifest authoring, testing, and request workflows, and the repository requires installers to be packaged as supported installer formats (MSIX, MSI, APPX, or executable installers), with script-based installers and fonts noted as unsupported.