Allow installing packages using GPO

Open
#3,192 0 comments 5 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub

Nobody has claimed this yet.

Assessment

Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Newbie friendliness
25/100
Issue type
Feature
Clarity
Mostly clear
Activity status
Stale
Tech stack
cpp
Domain
cli, operating-systems

Research direction

No files, tests, or entry points are named. Start by mapping how winget could receive Windows Group Policy configuration and how package sources, ownership, updates, and removal should be represented. Done means a defined GPO-driven installation lifecycle with source restrictions and clear behavior when policy entries change.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

Area-GPO Issue-Feature
Description of the new feature / enhancement

As a domain administrator I would like to be able to configure a group policy which triggers winget to install certain packages. An admin may also specify for each package entry, from which source the package may be installed to ensure.

Compared to already existing GPO software installation process, this would allow an administrator to ensure that new computers will have a current version of the package without requiring the administrator to upgrade the version hold on the DC manually. Also it could make it more transparent (in theory at least) to users & admins which packages were installed due to GPO. And those packages may be auto updated later on as well.

Compared with using a script GPO calling "winget" this allows admins to ensure, that e.g. Firefox is guaranteed to be installed from the official sources / MS Store / own sources the admin provides.

Proposed technical implementation details

If feasible, Windows / winget could remember, which packages were triggered by a GPO install and may then be able to uninstall them again if no GPO is referencing these packages anymore (and also no other dependency requires them to be installed).

Dominant language
C++
Stars
26.4k
Forks
1.8k
Avg merge
1d 11h
Merged PRs (30d)
15

Contributor guide

Open the contributing guide

First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

More from microsoft/winget-cli

All issues in microsoft/winget-cli

Similar issues

More C++ issues

Get new issues in your inbox

A short digest of beginner-friendly GitHub issues.