Do I need Chocolatey in Node.js for web development?

Question

During my Node installation, I was asked if I wanted to install Chocolatey. I am only interested in web development.

Do I need Chocolatey for web development?

Answer 1

Chocolatey is a Windows Package Manager, it manages packages.

https://docs.chocolatey.org/en-us/#what-is-chocolatey

You don't need Chocolatey in order to do web development. Having Chocolatey makes the automated installation and updating of the applications on your machine easier.

By itself, Chocolatey doesn't do anything with regard to updating the underlying operating system. I believe that you may be referring to an issue with a version of Node which included a Boxstarter script, which installed a number of Chocolatey packages, which also had the side effect of performing a series of Windows Updates during the installation. This was an unfortunate situation, but I believe it has been resolved.