PowerShell on 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"

If you do not have a preferred method of authentication, enable the storage credential helper, which will cache your credentials in plaintext on your system, so use a token.

git config --global credential.helper store

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

Download source code

Clone this repository recurisvely, as it's the superproject with a number of submodules.

git clone --recursive https://github.com/PowerShell/PowerShell-Linux.git

Read the documentation on submodules if you're not familiar with them.

Note that because GitHub's "Merge Pull Request" button merges with --no-ff, an extra merge commit will always be created. This can be especially annoying when trying to commit updates to submodules. Therefore our policy is to merge using the Git CLI after approval, preferably with a rebase to enable a fast-forward merge.

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.

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 --output $BIN
# Copy files that dotnet-publish doesn't currently deploy
cp *.ps1xml *_profile.ps1 $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

libpsl-native

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

cd src/libpsl-native
cmake -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Debug .
make -j
ctest -V
# Deploy development copy of libpsl-native
cp native/libpsl-native.* $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

PowerShell Remoting Protocol

PSRP communication is tunneled through OMI using the 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/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.