PowerShell/docs/building/windows-core.md

Build PowerShell on Windows for .NET Core

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.

Environment

These instructions are tested on Windows 10 and Windows Server 2012 R2, though they should work anywhere the dependencies work.

.NET CLI

We use the .NET Command Line Interface (dotnet) to build PowerShell. The following script will install dotnet and add it to your PowerShell session's path:

Invoke-WebRequest -Uri https://raw.githubusercontent.com/dotnet/cli/rel/1.0.0/scripts/obtain/install.ps1 -OutFile install.ps1
./install.ps1 -version 1.0.0-beta-002198
$env:Path += ";$env:LocalAppData\Microsoft\dotnet\cli

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.

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 -- src/windows-build 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.

Import-Module ./PowerShellGitHubDev.psm1
Start-PSBuild

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

The cross-platform host has built-in documentation via --help.

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