In the case of scanning Windows containers, it would be nice to have scancode be able to detect installed programs from the Windows registry.

Since Windows does not use a package manager to install programs, so we cannot examine it for installed packages, like we would for a Linux distro. What we can do is get the list of installed programs on a Windows system by looking in the registry at the key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall\. All installed programs that have uninstallers are listed here. For each program listed, there is a set of keys that can be used:

• InstallLocation
  • Allows us to know which files to associate with the program
• DisplayName
  • Used for package name
• DisplayVersion
  • Used for package version
• URLAboutInfo
  • Can be used for homepage_url

Installed programs can also be found in these locations

• HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\
• HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\WOW6432NODE
• HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\

However, the keys used to store the install location of these programs vary:

• Dir
• InstallDir
• InstallPath
• Path
• InstallationPath
• InstallLocation
• install dir
• install folder