Transcription
Are you missing the Microsoft Store? Well, I don't think anybody really misses the Microsoft Store, but you're probably missing some Microsoft apps. This is the video for you because I'm going to show you how to install these Microsoft Store apps without the Microsoft Store. Let's get on the desktop in Windows right now and I'll show you.
So, this is my bare-bones gaming system that I absolutely love, but there's a problem. It's a very, very clean install, and there's certain things that I need from this install, uh, specifically winget because I use my tool all the time. But since it's such a stripped-down version, I can't even access or get anything installed on the Microsoft Store. So, let's, let's tackle that.
Installing winget really is actually pretty easy. I made a little script here that is running these three commands. It's utilizing what's called PS Gallery. This is actually a Microsoft-sanctioned gallery, so Microsoft hosts everything from here, and it's actually referred to in official Microsoft knowledge base. So, as a sysadmin, you're going to use a lot of stuff from PS Gallery. This is a more unknown script that doesn't have very many downloads, but man, is it just well beautiful because it's able to do, even on a completely stripped system, able to grab every dependency needed.
So, let's, uh, run this command real fast just to show you what it does. We're going to open up our PowerShell and then we're just going to paste that command. With that in there, this right here, I'm going to break down each command for you. It's setting the PowerShell repository PS Gallery to a trusted policy. It means it's just not going to prompt you for it. You don't necessarily need to run this command if you're running each one of these line by line because there's going to be prompts if you don't use this command, which is fine if you want the prompts. So, we're going to go ahead and say "Yes, trust it."
With that done, let's move on to the next line. We're going to grab this script. It's just an install script. There's no website to type in or anything because when you say "Install-Script," immediately every Windows instance, whether it's Windows 10, Windows 11, it's going to reference PS Gallery because it's Microsoft's official repository. Put that in, and now it's installed the winget-install script. Instead of going back and copying the next line, you actually have an autocomplete now of winget-install, and there it is. You can click install.
And what this does is it's so much more powerful than using like `appx install` because it's using NuGet, which is a Visual Studio installer that is really hard to get on a bare-bones system. And this basically goes out and grabs all these really funky, obscure dependencies that might be missing from systems and installs them on any system. So, if it's an LTSC system, an Enterprise System, a stripped-down NTLite ISO like this one, it will literally go grab everything and put it right here. That's pretty cool, right?
But we're not done yet because there's more to learn about installing other stuff from the Microsoft Store that you don't necessarily have a nice install script like this for. So, there's actually a website you can go to, apps.microsoft.com, and this is like the Microsoft Store, and pretty much this is what the Microsoft Store is referencing. It just has a little bit different look to it, but you can actually do a search for any application and we can install that.
So, let's look through here and say, you know what, I'm feeling like I need some Spotify from the Microsoft Store because I hate myself. So, I'll grab this. Look at this app. Copy it. And what we're going to do is go to `rg.adguard.net`. This is actually another Microsoft site. Microsoft hosts this site. It's kind of a special site because any link created through this site is only temporary. So, don't put this in any scripts because `rg.adguard.net` you have to reference or basically do the search, and then that link is only available for a short period of time before it expires.
And this is it. It's just an online link generator for the Microsoft Store. We have that file in here. Let's paste it in, and that's that Spotify file. We're going to hit OK. Take us to what this needs. You can see it has these VC Libs dependencies. I know that's already installed because we installed winget, and that's also a dependency for it. And then we also have all these different versions. This can be really useful when trying to go to an older version from the Microsoft Store. So, let's say you want that older version or you want this new version. It just came out today. It's got to be good, right?
So, we're going to come back into our console after we get our links. Let's say we want the latest 1.96. We'll copy that link address. You can also click on it and download it from here, but you know, terminal sometimes better when you run into problems with their site because `rg.adguard.net` is really meant for sysadmins working in PowerShell. So, we're going to do an `Invoke-RestMethod` (IRM) `-Uri` quotes, we're going to paste that long link in there that's going to expire, we're going to `-Output` to `spot.appx`. And this is going to go out and download our 110 meg Microsoft Spotify app.
All right, with that downloaded, let's do `ls` to make sure we're `spot.appx` is there. You can see it, right? And then we just do an `Add-AppxPackage` and then we do `spot.appx`. Like that. I did a tab complete, that's why I added that extra stuff before it. And then we just hit enter.
This is now throwing an error. Why does that happen on some packages, you might ask? Well, we're either missing a dependency or we're also needing a license file. Now, if we look at the actual error message, it says, "Oh, well, you're missing VC Lib 140 for the x86." Oh, that's right, we did VC Lib 144 64-bit. That's another issue you might run into. As 64-bit and 32-bit issues aren't nearly as big of a thing as it was in the Vista days, but it's still there, hiding behind the scenes.
So, we can actually come into here and what we're going to do is grab that exact version we need, which was x86, which should be this guy. So, we're going to right-click it, copy link address, and then we're just going to do an `Invoke-RestMethod` (IRM) quotes, paste it in, `spot.appx`, and make sure we do the `-Output`. All right, that was a quick dependency, so not a very big file.
So, let's try to do the `Add-AppxPackage` `spot-dependency` like that. Okay, that one looked like it worked. Let's, uh, go up again and let's see if we can't add the spot one now. Oh, that's looking promising. No error. Did we now have Spotify on here? Hot dog! We just installed the Spotify version of the Microsoft app.
Now, if you do run into any launch issues, make sure you restart your computer because it's Windows, after all. But now that you see all these cool things, hopefully, this helps you get any Microsoft Store app that you want on your system without having to mess with the Microsoft Store.