Resolving common Winget issues

How to fix common winget isssues

Winget is one of the most useful tools for system administrators and power users that Microsoft has released in the past few years, allowing easy deployment of apps outside of the windows store.  Taking a similar approach to the repository based application managers in the linux space like Yum or Apt, winget references a large list of applications stored on various servers and indexed within the winget configs itself.

Unfortunately been a tool predominately focused at technical users there is a certain level of expected knowledge when using it. Often and one of the more common errors is that winget will claim it is not available, to resolve this winget needs to be registered and authenticated to installand manage applications.

Winget requires the Microsoft app installer, commonly this can be installed via navigating to the download link. Once downloaded you will need to run the msi and navigate back to the powershell window to enter this command “winget upgrade Microsoft.AppInstaller”.

To double check it has installed and updated run

(Get-AppxPackage Microsoft.DesktopAppInstaller).Version

It will present with the current version matching the download provided above.

Common Winget problems

The most common issue associated with winget is attempting to use it on a machine that hasn’t completed its windows update cycle, due to the permissions used by an application manager Microsoft enforces the latest version of windows for the current version of winget. If you get source errors or validation issues update your PC.

Winget will occasionally present a blank screen on any commands, this is usually an error with the sources and repos lited in its files. This can be solved with winget source -reset. To restore the default master repos list.