cygwin-portable-installer

1. What is it?
2. Features
3. Installation
   1. Customizing the installer
4. Update
5. License

What is it?

cygwin-portable-installer is a self-containing Windows batch file to perform an unattended installation of a portable Cygwin environment.

The installer has been implemented as a Batch script and not PowerShell script because in some corporate environments execution of PowerShell scripts isdisabled for non-administrative users via group policies.

Features

• portable: you can e.g. install it on an USB sticks and use the same configuration on different computers
• 256-color multi-tabbed shell: ConEmu is pre-configured as terminal by default. Alternatively you can choose to use the single tabbed Mintty terminal.
• command-line package installer: apt-cyg package manager will be automatically installed (opt-out via config parameter is possible)
• adaptive Bash prompt: bash-funk will be automatically installed (opt-out via config parameter is possible)
• winpty will be automatically installed (opt-out via config parameter is possible)
• additional optional tools (opt-in via config parameter):
  • Ansible: deployment automation tool
  • AWS CLI: AWS cloud command-line tool
  • Node.js: JavaScript runtime
  • testssl.sh: command line tool to check SSL/TLS configurations of servers

Installation

1. Get a copy of the installer using one of these ways:
   • Using old-school Copy & Paste:
     1. Create a local empty directory where Cygwin shall be installed, e.g. C:\apps\cygwin-portable
     2. Download the cygwin-portable-installer.cmd file into that directory.
   • Using Git:
     1. Clone the project into a local directory, e.g.

        git clone https://github.com/vegardit/cygwin-portable-installer --single-branch --branch master --depth 1 C:\apps\cygwin-portable

2. (Optional) Open the file cygwin-portable-installer.cmd in a text editor and adjust the configuration variables to e.g. set an HTTP Proxy, change the set of pre-installed Cygwin packages, select the terminal (ConEmu or Mintty), etc.
3. (Optional) Temporarily disable your Antivirus scanner in case it is known to interfere with Cygwin, otherwise you may end-up with a broken/incomplete installation. See cygwin.com/faq: What applications have been found to interfere with Cygwin?
   • For BitDefender Antivirus the Advanced Thread Defense protection feature needs to be disabled and not the Antivirus > Settings > BitDefender Shield.
4. Execute the cygwin-portable-installer.cmd. This will automatically:
   1. download the 32-bit or 64-bit Cygwin setup.exe depending on your OS
   2. install Cygwin with the pre-selected set of packages
   3. install the ConEmu tabbed terminal
   4. create an init scripts that will keep the installation portable
   5. install the apt-cyg command-line package manager
   6. install the bash-funk Bash toolbox with it's adaptive Bash prompt
   7. install winpty
   8. install optional tools:
      1. Ansible
      2. AWS CLI
      3. Node.js
      4. testssl.sh
5. Now you can launch your portable Cygwin environment using the newly created cygwin-portable.cmd batch file.

Customizing the installer

You can customize the installer by either directly modifying the default settings in the cygwin-portable-installer.cmd file,or by placing a separate file called cygwin-portable-installer-config.cmd next to it where some or all of these settings are overwritten.

These settings are currently available:

:: set proxy if required (unfortunately Cygwin setup.exe does not have commandline options to specify proxy user credentials)
set PROXY_HOST=
set PROXY_PORT=8080

:: change the URL to the closest mirror https://cygwin.com/mirrors.html
set CYGWIN_MIRROR=https://linux.rz.ruhr-uni-bochum.de/download/cygwin

:: one of: auto,64,32 - specifies if 32 or 64 bit version should be installed or automatically detected based on current OS architecture
set CYGWIN_ARCH=auto

:: choose a user name under Cygwin
set CYGWIN_USERNAME=root

:: select the packages to be installed automatically via apt-cyg
set CYGWIN_PACKAGES=bash-completion,bc,bzip,coreutils,curl,dos2unix,expect,git,git-svn,gnupg,inetutils,jq,lz4,mc,nc,openssh,openssl,perl,psmisc,python37,pv,rsync,ssh-pageant,screen,subversion,unzip,vim,wget,zip,zstd

:: if set to 'yes' the local package cache created by cygwin setup will be deleted after installation/update
set DELETE_CYGWIN_PACKAGE_CACHE=no

:: if set to 'yes' the apt-cyg command line package manager (https://github.com/kou1okada/apt-cyg) will be installed automatically
set INSTALL_APT_CYG=yes

:: if set to 'yes' the bash-funk adaptive Bash prompt (https://github.com/vegardit/bash-funk) will be installed automatically
set INSTALL_BASH_FUNK=yes

:: if set to 'yes' Node.js (https://nodejs.org/) will be installed automatically
set INSTALL_NODEJS=yes
:: Use of the folder names found here https://nodejs.org/dist/ as version name.
set NODEJS_VERSION=latest-v14.x
:: one of: auto,64,32 - specifies if 32 or 64 bit version should be installed or automatically detected based on current OS architecture
set NODEJS_ARCH=auto

:: if set to 'yes' Ansible (https://github.com/ansible/ansible) will be installed automatically
set INSTALL_ANSIBLE=yes
set ANSIBLE_GIT_BRANCH=stable-2.10

:: if set to 'yes' AWS CLI (https://github.com/aws/aws-cli) will be installed automatically
set INSTALL_AWS_CLI=yes

:: if set to 'yes' testssl.sh (https://testssl.sh/) will be installed automatically
set INSTALL_TESTSSL_SH=yes
:: name of the GIT branch to install from, see https://github.com/drwetter/testssl.sh/
set TESTSSL_GIT_BRANCH=3.0

:: use ConEmu based tabbed terminal instead of Mintty based single window terminal, see https://conemu.github.io/
set INSTALL_CONEMU=yes
set CON_EMU_OPTIONS=-Title cygwin-portable ^
 -QuitOnClose

:: if set to 'yes' the winpty (https://github.com/rprichard/winpty) will be installed automatically
set INSTALL_WINPTY=yes
set WINPTY_VERSION=0.4.3

:: add more path if required, but at the cost of runtime performance (e.g. slower forks)
set CYGWIN_PATH=%%SystemRoot%%\system32;%%SystemRoot%%

:: set Mintty options, see https://cdn.rawgit.com/mintty/mintty/master/docs/mintty.1.html#CONFIGURATION
set MINTTY_OPTIONS=--Title cygwin-portable ^
  -o Columns=160 ^
  -o Rows=50 ^
  -o BellType=0 ^
  -o ClicksPlaceCursor=yes ^
  -o CursorBlinks=yes ^
  -o CursorColour=96,96,255 ^
  -o CursorType=Block ^
  -o CopyOnSelect=yes ^
  -o RightClickAction=Paste ^
  -o Font="Courier New" ^
  -o FontHeight=10 ^
  -o FontSmoothing=None ^
  -o ScrollbackLines=10000 ^
  -o Transparency=off ^
  -o Term=xterm-256color ^
  -o Charset=UTF-8 ^
  -o Locale=C

Executing commands after installation

When you place a separate cygwin-portable-installer-post-tasks.cmd file next to the cygwin-portable-installer.cmd it will beexecuted automatically after the installation suceeded. You can use this file to perform additional configurations.

Updating your installation

To update installed Cygwin packages execute the generated cygwin-portable-updater.cmd file.

License

All files are released under the Apache License 2.0.

Individual files contain the following tag instead of the full license text:

SPDX-License-Identifier: Apache-2.0

This enables machine processing of license information based on the SPDX License Identifiers that are available here: https://spdx.org/licenses/.