Recently I’ve changed my workstation to new one. Previously I’ve installed bunch of Cygwin packages on my old workstation.
So I thought; can I somehow migrate my installed Cygwin packages from my old workstation to new workstation?
The answer is yes. Follow me along to this wonderful journey XD
First you’ll need to save list of what you have installed on your Cygwin on old workstation.
To do this, open the Cygwin terminal/console & run this command below:
grep " 1$" /etc/setup/installed.db | awk '{printf "%s%s",sep,$1; sep=","} END{print ""}' > cygwin_packages.txt
Its basically dump list of installed Cygwin packages in your workstation & save it to text file named “cygwin_packages.txt” with comma-separated.
Next, go to your Cygwin home folder (commonly locate at “C:\cygwin64\home\”), open the “cygwin_packages.txt” file that we save before & copy all the content inside the text file (CTRL-C).
Next, at your new workstation, ensure you have downloaded the latest Cygwin installer “setup-x86.exe” (32-bit) or “setup-x86_64.exe” (64-bit).
Then, open your Windows cmd & change you directory to where you save the Cygwin installer; for my case here, I save it in my Downloads folder “C:\Users\Zam\Downloads”.
Then, run this command below on your Windows cmd; replacing/inserting the content of cygwin_packages.txt inside the double-quote as below:
setup-x86.exe -q -P "<paste the cygwin_packages.txt content here>"
You should see the Cygwin GUI opened & UAC requesting permission pop-up:
Click “Yes”, go through “Next” button & wait until the installation finished.
If your old installation of cygwin had an extended number of packages, you are better off doing the following:
Do a minimal installation, which will ask you where you want the installation to occur, and allows you to establish your local package directory. Then you can use a “for loop”:
Example:
for /F “tokens=*” %A in (cygwin_packages.txt) do (
start /wait C:\Users\username\Downloads\setup-x86_64.exe -q -l “” -P “%A”
)