Support for installation of portable/standalone apps

[KiruyaMomochi]

Description of the new feature/enhancement

There are programs like starship or aria2, which only provide portable archived files.
There maybe also some apps just releases an standalone .exe file.
Although we can request they to build an msi/msix package, it will be more convenient if we support to install them directly.

For the portable apps, the install may mean extract the archive to Program Files, then create a shim-like redirection for the program, put it into a specific directory, and add the directory to PATH.

Related:

• winget-cli .zip files not supported winget-pkgs#174
• Portable/stand-alone executables winget-cli-restsource#116

Edited by @denelon

[timvisee]

Yes, I'd like to see this as well. Many other tools you might use in the terminal (it is a CLI package installer after all) are provided as standalone binaries. I'd like to package ffsend.

Existing package managers for Windows such as scoop or Chocolatey allow the installation of standalone binaries as well. Some inspiration might be taken from there.

[RobCannon]

I would love to be able to install tools like terraform, packer, kubectl, etc.. I could use scoop.sh, but I would love to have one tool to handle everything. winget should be able to install command line tools to a common directory in the user's directory but also make sure that directory is part of the path.

[marcomorain]

I'm looking for this support to package the CircleCI CLI tool.

👍

[koppor]

This is useful for the mob tool which is fundamental for remote mob programming. A release for windows is a single .tar.gz file containing a single .exe file.

[darrenj]

Also useful for the ngrok tool for HTTP tunnelling.

[karsten3s]

To piggy back off of this, how would we go about installing applications like https://github.com/ggreer/the_silver_searcher where there will be no direct developer support for windows? There are unofficial windows builds but can those be considered?

[yazz]

I would like to be able to package a standalone app too, Yazz Pilot which is a single .exe file. Any estimate on when this will be coming?

[ajeetdsouza]

Is there any update on this? I'd love to be able to package zoxide via WinGet. Being a command-line app, it is distributed as a single binary.

This would be a very useful feature for a lot of similar apps. Note that Scoop already supports this.

[soroshsabz]

blocks #30972