Microsoft has been making a lot of inroads in the Open Source and Linux communities lately. Linux and Unix purists undoubtedly have been skeptical of this recent shift. Canonical for example, has caught flak for partnering with Microsoft recently. But the times are changing, so instead of resenting this progress, I chose to embrace it. I’ll even admit that I actually like many of the Open Source contributions Microsoft has been making – including a flourishing Github account, as well as an increasingly rich, and cross platform platform set of tools that includes Visual Studio Code, Ubuntu/Bash for Windows, .NET Core and many others.
If you want to take the latest and greatest in Powershell v6 for a spin on a Linux system, I recommend using a Docker container if available. Otherwise just spin up an Ubuntu (14.04+) VM and you should be ready. I do not recommend trying out Powershell for any type of workload outside of experimentation, as it is still in alpha for Linux. The beta v6 release (with Linux support) is around the corner but there is still a lot of ground that needs to be covered to get there. Since Powershell is Open Source you can follow the progress on Github!
If you use the Docker method, just pull and run the container:
docker run -it --rm ubuntu:16.04 bash
Then add the Microsoft Ubuntu repo:
# apt-transport-https is needed for connecting to the MS repo
apt-get update && apt-get install curl apt-transport-https
curl https://packages.microsoft.com/keys/microsoft.asc | apt-key add - curl https://packages.microsoft.com/config/ubuntu/16.04/prod.list | tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/microsoft.list
Update and install Powershell:
sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install -y powershell
Finally, start up Powershell:
powershell
If it worked, you should see a message for Powershell and a new command prompt:
# powershell PowerShell Copyright (C) 2016 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. PS />
Congratulations, you now have Powershell running in Linux. To take it for a spin, try a few commands out.
Write-Host "Hello Wordl!"
This should print out a hello world message. The Linux release is still in alpha, so there will surely be some discrepancies between Linux and Windows based systems, but the majority of cmdlets should work the same way. For example, I noticed in my testing that the terminal was very flaky. Reverse search (ctrl+r) and the Get-History cmdlet worked well, but arrow key scrolling through history did not.
You can even run Powershell on OSX now if you choose to. I haven’t tried it yet, but is an option for those that are curious. Needless to say, I am looking for the
