Easily obtain silent install scripts for use in deployments

[MattHiggs]

Hey all.  This may be common sense to some of you, but I thought I would share how you can easily obtain silent install scripts, or the resources pertaining to those install scripts (to allow you to create your own, custom software deployments) easily and for free.  This requires that at least one computer somewhere has chocolatey (https://chocolatey.org/) installed.  Now lets take, for example, adobe flash player.  Normally, obtaining the installer involves getting a license from adobe (or something similar to that) to gain access to the msi installer for flash player (which allows for silent installation).  Instead of doing that though, on our "chocolatey" computer, lets go ahead and install flash player:

1. Open command prompt with admin credentials

2) type "choco install flashplayerplugin -y" and press Enter

Once the process is complete, (making sure that you are able to "view hidden items" in Windows explorer) navigate to C:\ProgramData\chocolatey\lib\[name_of_application_installed]\tools.  This folder contains the script (chocolateyinstall.ps1) which was used to install adobe flash player to your machine, which also includes (for those who just want the msi file) the URL used to download the flashplayer msi to your machine.  Alternatively, you could do a search (I use "Everything" by voidtools.com) for msi packages on your machine (*.msi in search bar) and find the one that says adobe flash player somewhere (the reason I use * is so that I don't miss it because I got the name wrong, but more likely than not, it is somewhere in AppData directory).  So now not only do you have the script which contains the logic to perform the silent install of the software, but you have access to the URL and files themselves used to make it happen, which is invaluable in the event you want to incorporate your own custom tasks into an installation.  Have a blast.