Build PowerShell on Linux

This guide will walk you through building PowerShell on Linux. We'll start by showing how to set up your environment from scratch.

Environment

These instructions are written assuming the Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, since that's the distro the team uses.

Toolchain Setup

We use the .NET Command Line Interface (dotnet) to build the managed components, and CMake to build the native components. Install the following packages for the toolchain:

dotnet
cmake
make
g++
libunwind8
libicu52

And for debgging:

strace
lldb-3.6

In order to get dotnet, we need to add an additional package source:

sudo sh -c 'echo "deb [arch=amd64] http://apt-mo.trafficmanager.net/repos/dotnet/ trusty main" > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/dotnetdev.list'
sudo apt-key adv --keyserver apt-mo.trafficmanager.net --recv-keys 417A0893
sudo apt-get update

Then install the packages you need:

sudo apt-get install dotnet cmake make g++ libunwind8 libicu52 strace lldb-3.6

.NET CLI

If you have any problems installing dotnet, please see their documentation.

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.

The drawback of using the feed is that it gets out of date. To upgrade the package, install it by hand. Unfortunately, dpkg does not handle dependency resolution, so it is recommended to first install the older version from the feed, and then upgrade it.

wget https://dotnetcli.blob.core.windows.net/dotnet/beta/Installers/Latest/dotnet-ubuntu-x64.latest.deb
sudo dpkg -i ./dotnet-ubuntu-x64.latest.deb

Git Setup

Please clone the superproject (this repo) and initialize a subset of the submodules:

git clone https://github.com/PowerShell/PowerShell.git
cd PowerShell
git submodule update --init --recursive -- src/windows-build src/libpsl-native src/Microsoft.PowerShell.Linux.Host/Modules/Pester

Build using our module

We maintain a PowerShellGitHubDev.psm1 PowerShell module with the function Start-PSBuild to build PowerShell. Since this is PowerShell code, it requires self-hosting. Fortunately, this is as easy as downloading and installing the package. Unfortunately, while the repository is still private, the package cannot be downloaded as simply as with wget. We have a script that wraps the GitHub API and uses a personal access token to authorize and obtain the package.

You can alternativelly download via a browser and upload it to your box via some other method

GITHUB_TOKEN=<replace with your token> ./download.sh
sudo dpkg -i ./powershell.deb
powershell

You should now be in a powershell console host that is installed separately from any development copy you're about to build. Just import our module and build!

Import-Module ./PowerShellGitHubDev.psm1
Start-PSBuild

Congratulations! If everything went right, PowerShell is now built and executable as ./bin/powershell.

Note that the ./build.sh script is deprecated and may be removed

You can run our cross-platform Pester tests with ./bin/powershell -c "Invoke-Pester test/powershell".

Build manually

The following goes into detail about what Start-PSBuild does.

Build the native library

The libpsl-native.so library consists of native functions that CorePsPlatform.cs P/Invokes.

pushd src/libpsl-native
cmake -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Debug .
make -j
make test
popd

This library will be emitted in the src/Microsoft.PowerShell.Linux.Host project, where dotnet consumes it as "content" and thus automatically deploys it.

Build the managed projects

The Linux.Host, while poorly named, is the cross-platform host for PowerShell targetting .NET Core. It is the top level project, so dotnet publish transitively builds all its dependencies, and emits a powershell executable and all necessary libraries (both native and managed) in a flat directory (specified with --output, otherwise automatically nested depending on runtime, configuration, and framework, see issue #685). The --configuration Linux flag is necessary to ensure that the preprocessor definition LINUX is defined (see issue #673).

dotnet restore
dotnet publish --output bin --configuration Linux src/Microsoft.PowerShell.Linux.Host

PowerShell and all necessary components should now be in the bin folder.

4.9 KiB Raw Blame History