PowerShell

Build Status

Platform	master
Ubuntu 14.04
Windows

Team coordination

• PSCore Slack chat
• Waffle.io scrum board

Obtain the source code

Setup Git

Install Git, the version control system.

See the Contributing Guidelines for more Git information, such as our installation instructions, contributing rules, and Git best practices.

Download source code

Clone this repository. It is a "superproject" and has a number of other repositories embedded within it as submodules. Please see the contributing guidelines and learn about submodules.

git clone https://github.com/PowerShell/PowerShell.git
cd PowerShell

Windows

On Windows, many fewer submodules are needed, so specify them:

git submodule update --init --recursive -- src/windows-build src/Microsoft.PowerShell.Linux.Host/Modules/Pester

Setup build environment

Windows

Tested on Windows 10 and Windows Server 2012 R2.

Invoke-WebRequest -Uri https://raw.githubusercontent.com/dotnet/cli/rel/1.0.0/scripts/obtain/install.ps1 -OutFile install.ps1
./install.ps1 -version 1.0.0.001888
$env:Path += ";$env:LocalAppData\Microsoft\dotnet\cli

If you meet Unable to cast COM object of type 'System.__ComObject' to interface type 'Microsoft.Cci.ISymUnmanagedWriter5', please install Visual C++ Redistributable for Visual Studio 2015.

Building

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

Start-PSBuild from module ./PowerShellGitHubDev.psm1 on Windows and Linux / OS X, if you are self-hosting PowerShell.

Specifically:

Windows

In PowerShell:

cd PowerShell
dotnet restore
Import-Module .\PowerShellGitHubDev.psm1
Start-PSBuild # build CoreCLR version
Start-PSBuild -FullCLR # build FullCLR version

Tip: use Start-PSBuild -Verbose switch to see more information about build process.

Running

If you encounter any problems, see the known issues, otherwise open a new issue on GitHub.

The local managed host has built-in documentation via --help.

Windows

• launch ./bin/powershell.exe
• run tests with ./bin/powershell.exe -c "Invoke-Pester test/powershell"

Debugging

To enable debugging on Linux, follow the installation instructions for Experimental .NET Core Debugging in VS Code. You will also want to review their detailed instructions.

VS Code will place a .vscode directory in the PowerShell folder. This contains the launch.json file, which you will customize using the instructions below. You will also be prompted to create a tasks.json file.

Currently, debugging supports attaching to a currently running powershell process. Assuming you've created a launch.json file correctly, within the "configuration" section, use the below settings:

"configurations": [
    {
        "name": "powershell",
        "type": "coreclr",
        "request": "attach",
        "processName": "powershell"
    }
]

VS Code will now attach to a running powershell process. Start powershell, then (in VS Code) press F5 to begin the debugger.

PowerShell Remoting Protocol

PSRP communication is tunneled through OMI using the omi-provider.

PSRP has been observed working on OS X, but the changes made to OMI to accomplish this are not even beta-ready and need to be done correctly. They exist on the andschwa-osx branch of the OMI repository.

PSRP support is not built automatically. See the detailed notes on how to enable it.

Running

Some initial setup on Windows is required. Open an administrative command prompt and execute the following:

winrm set winrm/config/Client @{AllowUnencrypted="true"}
winrm set winrm/config/Client @{TrustedHosts="*"}

You can also set the TrustedHosts to include the target's IP address.

Then on Linux, launch omiserver in the debugger (after building with the instructions above):

./psrp.sh
run

The run command is executed inside of LLDB (the debugger) to start the omiserver process.

Now in a PowerShell prompt on Windows (opened after setting the WinRM client configurations):

Enter-PSSession -ComputerName <IP address of Linux machine> -Credential $cred -Authentication basic

The $cred variable can be empty; a credentials prompt will appear, enter any fake credentials you wish as authentication is not yet implemented.

The IP address of the Linux machine can be obtained with:

ip -f inet addr show dev eth0

Detailed Build Script Notes

This sections explains the build scripts.

The variable $BIN is the output directory, bin.

PSRP

OMI

PSRP support is not built by ./build.sh

To develop on the PowerShell Remoting Protocol (PSRP) for Linux, 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

Note that the OMI build steps can be done with ./omibuild.sh.

Build OMI from source in developer mode:

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.

FullCLR PowerShell

On Windows, we also build Full PowerShell for .NET 4.5.1

Setup environment

• Install the Visual C++ Compiler via Visual Studio 2015.

This component is required to compile the native powershell.exe host.

This is an optionally installed component, so you may need to run the Visual Studio installer again.

If you don't have any Visual Studio installed, you can use Visual Studio 2015 Community Edition.

Compiling with older versions should work, but we don't test it.

Troubleshooting note: If cmake says that it cannot determine the C and CXX compilers, you either don't have Visual Studio, or you don't have the Visual C++ Compiler component installed.

• Install CMake and add it to PATH.

You can install it from Chocolatey or manually.

choco install cmake.portable

• Install .NET CLI via their [documentation][cli-docs]

Building

Start-PSBuild -FullCLR

Troubleshooting: the build logic is relatively simple and contains following steps:

• building managed DLLs: dotnet publish --runtime net451
• generating Visual Studio project: cmake -G "$cmakeGenerator"
• building powershell.exe from generated solution: msbuild powershell.sln

All this steps can be run separately from Start-PSBuild, don't hesitate to experiment.

Running

Running FullCLR version is not as simple as CoreCLR version.

If you just run .\binFull\powershell.exe, you will get a powershell process, but all the interesting DLLs (i.e. System.Management.Automation.dll) would be loaded from the GAC, not your binFull build directory.

@lzybkr wrote a module to deal with it and run side-by-side.

Import-Module .\PowerShellGithubDev.psm1
Start-DevPSGithub -binDir $pwd\binFull

Troubleshooting: default for powershell.exe that we build is x86.

There is a separate execution policy registry key for x86, and it's likely that you didn't bypass enable it. From powershell.exe (x86) run:

Set-ExecutionPolicy Bypass

Running from CI server

We publish an archive with FullCLR bits on every CI build with AppVeyor.

• Download zip package from artifacts tab of the particular build.
• Unblock zip file: right-click in file explorer -> properties -> check 'Unblock' checkbox -> apply
• Extract zip file to $bin directory
• Start-DevPSGithub -binDir $bin