Boxstarter is a command line tool for creating software packages for installing on supported Windows environments. It is based on the popular automated software installation tool Chocolatey which itself is capable of quick silent installation of thousands of programs. Boxstarter uses Chocolatey to perform silent installations of multiple software on your system.
Boxstarter itself has to be installed through Chocolatey. Once you have installer Boxstarter, you can start creating packages which contain many applications to be installed on Windows. These packages are saved in form of scripts and can later use on any number of other devices.
Boxstarter comes in form of a ZIP archive which contains a PowerShell script and a batch script. You just have to double-click on the batch script setup.bat. It will automatically download Boxstarter and install it on your system. If your system does not have Chocolatey installed, then it will also install Chocolatey because that is required for Boxstarter.
After Boxstarter has been installed, you can open any PowerShell window and give the command boxstartershell. This will give you the shell from where you can create new packages, build packages, install packages or enable a VM. The VM is used for installing the packages on a Windows environment running on a virtual machine which can be used for testing purposes. According to Boxstarter documentation, it supports only Windows 7 SP1 and Windows 8.1 running in a VM.
Usually people create such packages for their own use or for their organizations. But if you are really excited about your software packages built using Boxstarter, then you can also share them with others by publishing them online.
You can get the help for using Boxstarter either by using the Get-Help command in the Boxstarter shell, or by visiting the official website of Boxstarter. They have comprehensive documentation and tutorials for using Boxstarter efficiently.
You can download Boxstarter from https://github.com/chocolatey/boxstarter or https://boxstarter.org/.