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Build PowerShell on Windows for .NET Core
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.
Environment
These instructions are tested on Windows 10 and Windows Server 2012 R2, though they should work anywhere the dependencies work.
Git Setup
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.
Visual Studio
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.
Visual Studio Code
Building PowerShell using Visual Studio Code depends on the PowerShell executable to be called pwsh
which means
that you must have PowerShell Core 6 Beta.9 (or newer) installed to successfully build this project (typically for the purpose of debugging).
.NET CLI
We use the .NET Command Line Interface (dotnet
) to build PowerShell.
The version we are currently using is 2.0.0
.
The Start-PSBootstrap
function will automatically install it and add it to your path:
Import-Module ./build.psm1
Start-PSBootstrap
Or you can call Install-Dotnet
directly:
Install-Dotnet
It removes the previously installed version of .NET CLI and install the version that PowerShell Core depends on.
If you have any problems installing dotnet
, please see their documentation.
Build using our module
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/netcoreapp3.0/win7-x64/publish/pwsh.exe
.
This location is of the form ./[project]/bin/[configuration]/[framework]/[rid]/publish/[binary name]
,
and our project is powershell
, configuration is Debug
by default,
framework is netcoreapp3.0
, runtime identifier is win7-x64
by default,
and binary name is pwsh
.
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 pwsh
executable.
The cross-platform host has built-in documentation via --help
.
You can run our cross-platform Pester tests with Start-PSPester
.
Building in Visual Studio
We currently have the issue #3400 tracking this task.