This guide will walk you through building PowerShell on Windows, targetting .NET Core. We'll start by showing how to set up your environment from scratch.
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.
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/install.ps1 -OutFile install.ps1
./install.ps1
If you have any problems installing dotnet
, please see their
documentation.
If you are using Windows 7, Windows Server 2008 or Windows Server 2012 you will also need to install Visual C++ Redistributable for Visual Studio 2012 Update 4 and Visual C++ Redistributable for Visual Studio 2015.
The version of .NET CLI is very important, you want a recent build of 1.0.0 (not 1.0.1).
Previous installations of DNX, dnvm
, or older installations of .NET
CLI can cause odd failures when running. Please check your version.
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/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
netcoreapp1.0
, 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
.