PowerShell for Linux

Obtain the source code

Setup Git

Install Git, the version control system. If you're new to Git, peruse the documentation and go through some tutorials; I recommend familiarizing yourself with checkout, branch, pull, push, merge, and after a while, rebase and cherry-pick. Please commit early and often.

The user name and email must be set to do just about anything with Git.

git config --global user.name "First Last"
git config --global user.email "alias@microsoft.com"

I highly recommend these configurations to help deal with whitespace, rebasing, and general use of Git.

Auto-corrects your command when it's sure (stats to status)

git config --global help.autoCorrect -1

Refuses to merge when pulling, and only pushes to branch with same name.

git config --global pull.ff only
git config --global push.default current

Shows shorter commit hashes and always shows reference names in the log.

git config --global log.abbrevCommit true
git config --global log.decorate short

Ignores whitespace changes and uses more information when merging.

git config --global apply.ignoreWhitespace change
git config --global rerere.enabled true
git config --global rerere.autoUpdate true
git config --global am.threeWay true

Setup Visual Studio Online authentication

To use Git's https protocol with VSO, you'll want to setup tokens, and have Git remember them.

1. git config --global credential.helper store
2. Login to https://msostc.visualstudio.com
3. Click your name in the upper left corner and click 'My profile'
4. Click the "Security" tab in the left pane (under "Details")
5. Click "Add"
6. Enter "msostc" for "Description"
7. Set "Expires In" to "1 year"
8. Choose " msostc" for "Accounts"
9. Choose "All scopes"
10. Click "Create Token" (you may want to copy this token somewhere safe, as VSO will not show it again!)
11. Use this token as the password when cloning (and your username for the username)

Setup GitHub authentication

We are working to move all our repositories to GitHub. Unfortunately, this transition is incomplete, but in progress. The DSC and OMI submodules are hosted on GitHub, and while the former is a public repository, the latter is private, thus requiring authentication.

You should already have your credential helper setup to "store," and so should use a token with GitHub (instead of your plaintext password). Follow their instructions.

Download source code

Clone our monad-linux source from Visual Studio Online, it's the superproject with a number of submodules.

git clone --recursive https://msostc.visualstudio.com/DefaultCollection/PS/_git/monad-linux

Please read the documentation on submodules if you're not familiar with them. Note that because VSO's "Complete Pull Request" button merges with --no-ff, an extra merge commit will always be created. This can be annoying when trying to commit updates to submodules. When a submodule PR is approved, you can "complete" it without a merge commit by merging it to develop manually and pushing the updated head.

Our convention is to create feature branches dev/feature off master, except in src/monad where we branch off develop.

Setup build environment

We use the .NET Command Line Interface (dotnet-cli) to build the managed components, and CMake to build the native components. Install dotnet-cli by following their documentation (make sure to install the dotnet-dev package to get the latest version). Then install the following dependencies (assuming Ubuntu 14.04):

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

OMI

To develop on the PowerShell Remoting Protocol (PSRP), you'll need to be able to compile OMI, which additionally requires:

sudo apt-get install libpam0g-dev libssl-dev libcurl4-openssl-dev libboost-filesystem-dev 

Building

The command dotnet restore must be done at least once from the top directory to obtain all the necessary .NET packages.

Build with ./build.sh, which does the following steps.

The variable $BIN is the output directory, bin.

Native

• libpsnative.so: native functions that CorePsPlatform.cs P/Invokes
• api-ms-win-core-registry-l1-1-0.dll: registry stub to prevent missing DLL error on shutdown

monad-native

Driven by CMake, with its own unit tests using Google Test.

cd src/monad-native
cmake -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Debug .
make -j
ctest -V
# Deploy development copy of libpsnative
cp native/libpsnative.so $BIN

registry-stub

Provides RegCloseKey() to satisfy the disposal of SafeHandle objects on shutdown.

cd src/registry-stub
make
cp api-ms-win-core-registry-l1-1-0.dll $BIN

Managed

Builds with dotnet-cli. Publishes all dependencies into the bin directory. Emits its own native host as bin/Microsoft.PowerShell.Linux.Host.

cd src/Microsoft.PowerShell.Linux.Host
dotnet publish --framework dnxcore50 --runtime ubuntu.14.04-x64 --output $BIN
# Copy files that dotnet-publish doesn't currently deploy
cp *.ps1xml *_profile.ps1 $BIN

PowerShell Remoting Protocol

PSRP communication is tunneled through OMI using the monad-omi-provider. These build steps are not part of the ./build.sh script.

OMI

cd src/omi/Unix
./configure --dev
make -j

Provider

The provider uses CMake to build, link, and register with OMI.

cd src/monad-omi-provider
cmake .
make -j

The provider also maintains its own native host library to initialize the CLR, but there are plans to refactor .NET's packaged host as a shared library.

DSC

DSC also uses OMI, so build it first, then build DSC against it. Unfortunately, DSC cannot be configured to look for OMI elsewhere, so for now you need to symlink it to the expected location.

ln -s ../omi/Unix/ omi-1.0.8
./configure --no-rpm --no-dpkg --local
make -j

Running

• launch local shell with ./bin/Microsoft.PowerShell.Linux.Host
• launch local shell in LLDB with ./debug.sh
• launch omiserver for PSRP (and in LLDB) with ./prsp.sh, and connect with Enter-PSSession from Windows

Known Issues

xUnit

Sadly, dotnet-test is not fully supported on Linux, so our xUnit tests do not currently run. We may be able to work around this, or get the dotnet-cli team to fix their xUnit runner. GitHub issue.