winget commands, and the identifier for every program here

Windows has had a package manager since 2020 and most people meet it through one command: update everything. This page covers that one, the flags that change what it does, and the exact identifier for each of the 221 programs indexed here.

We have a particular reason to publish this: the winget repository is where the download URLs and hashes on this site come from. The identifier in the table is the same key we use to fetch a program's manifest.

The commands that come up

Common questions

What does --include-unknown actually do?

winget compares the installed version with the available one, and for some programs it cannot determine what is installed: they appear in the list with a version of "Unknown" and a plain upgrade --all leaves them alone. The flag tells it to upgrade them anyway. Nothing is wrong with those packages; winget simply has no reliable version to compare against, usually because the program does not record one where winget looks.

Why does Windows say winget is not recognized?

winget is not part of Windows itself. It arrives with the App Installer package from the Microsoft Store, so a machine that has never received it, or an image where Store apps were stripped out, does not have the command at all. Installing or updating App Installer from the Store is the normal fix, and the winget-cli releases on GitHub are the other route. It is also registered per user, which is why it can be missing from an elevated session or a scheduled task running as SYSTEM even though it works in your own terminal.

Where does winget install programs to?

It does not decide. winget downloads the publisher’s own installer and runs it, so the destination is whatever that installer chooses, exactly as if you had double-clicked it. Where the manifest supports both, --scope machine and --scope user pick between all users and just yours, and that is the only part of the location winget controls.

Is winget the same as the Microsoft Store?

No, though it can install Store packages too. Most of what it offers comes from the community repository of manifests, and a manifest is a pointer: it holds the publisher’s own download URL and the SHA-256 of that file rather than a copy of the program. That is the same data this site is built on.