This guide will walk you through building PowerShell on Windows, targeting .NET Core. We'll start by showing how to set up your environment from scratch.
You can also build PowerShell for Full .NET framework on Windows.
These instructions are tested on Windows 10 and Windows Server 2012 R2, though they should work anywhere the dependencies work.
Using Git requires it to be setup correctly; refer to the README and Contributing Guidelines.
This guide assumes that you have recursively cloned the PowerShell repository and cd
ed into it.
You will need to install an edition of Visual Studio 2015 (Community, Enterprise, or Professional) with the optional feature 'Common Tools for Visual C++' installed. The free Community edition of Visual Studio 2015 can be downloaded here.
We use the .NET Command Line Interface (dotnet
) to build PowerShell.
The Start-PSBootstrap
function will automatically install it and add it to your path:
Import-Module ./build.psm1
Start-PSBootstrap
The Start-PSBootstrap
function itself does exactly this:
Invoke-WebRequest -Uri https://raw.githubusercontent.com/dotnet/cli/rel/1.0.0/scripts/obtain/dotnet-install.ps1 -OutFile install.ps1
./install.ps1
If you have any problems installing dotnet
, please see their documentation.
We maintain a PowerShell module with the function Start-PSBuild
to build PowerShell.
Import-Module ./build.psm1
Start-PSBuild
Congratulations! If everything went right, PowerShell is now built and executable as ./src/powershell-win-core/bin/Debug/netcoreapp1.0/win10-x64/powershell
.
This location is of the form ./[project]/bin/[configuration]/[framework]/[rid]/[binary name]
,
and our project is powershell
, configuration is Debug
by default,
framework is netcoreapp1.1
, runtime identifier is probably win10-x64
(but will depend on your operating system;
don't worry, dotnet --info
will tell you what it was), and binary name is powershell
.
The function Get-PSOutput
will return the path to the executable;
thus you can execute the development copy via & (Get-PSOutput)
.
The powershell
project is the .NET Core PowerShell host.
It is the top level project, so dotnet build
transitively builds all its dependencies,
and emits a powershell
executable.
The cross-platform host has built-in documentation via --help
.
You can run our cross-platform Pester tests with Start-PSPester
.
We do not recommend building the PowerShell solution from Visual Studio. This may lead to package version mismatches with errors similar to:
C:\dev\powershell\src\System.Management.Automation\project.json(142,77): error NU1001: The dependency Microsoft.PowerShe
ll.CoreCLR.AssemblyLoadContext >= 1.0.0-* could not be resolved.
If you find yourself blocked by these errors, either run git clean -ffdx
or run Start-PSBuild -Clean
.