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Alternatives

There are a lot of other existing tools out there that can install software or act as wrapper for development tools. Here we list such tools we are aware of. This list does not claim to be complete but we should have covered the most important onces. Surely there are also the "app stores" that come with your operating system with graphical UI that we do not explicitly list here. Surely we believe that we offer the perfect solution, if you want to automate the tool setup for your dev project and even maintain it over the project lifecycle with ease. However, if your goal is only to easily install arbitrary software on your machine, then generic tool installers (maybe SDKMan) can be the better choice for you. Feel free to try these tools as well and make your choice and see what fits best for your.

Automate project dev environments

  • Development Containers: a docker centric appraoch to setup tools in containers, driven by Microsoft, requires support by IDE tools as front-end what seems to be given for IntelliJ and VSCode.

Generic tool installers

  • SDKMan - cross platform software installer as CLI

  • Chocolatey - Windows software installer as CLI, started early on before WinGet or Scoop were born

  • WinGet - Windows software installer as CLI, driven by Microsoft and therefore widely accepted, frontends and other integrations available.

  • Scoop - Windows software installer as CLI, open and collaborative via buckets as git repos

  • Homebrew - MacOS de-fakto standard tool to easily install software.

  • Nix - sort of cross platform software packager, also available as its own Linux based operating system NixOS, but can be used on any Linux or Mac and on Windows in WSL2.

  • Flatpak - a distro independent linux package manager, packages ship with all required dependencies and can be installed and started on any Linux.

Tool wrappers

  • mvnw - Wrapper script for maven (mvn), allows to configure your maven version in git and the wrapper will download and run it for you

  • gradlew - Wrapper script for gradle, allows to configure your gradle version in git and the wrapper script will download and run it for you