PowerShell is open sourced and available on Linux

  • Article

PowerShell is 20-19-highlight-newslettera task-based command-line shell and scripting language built on the .NET Framework to help IT professionals control and automate the administration of the Windows, and now Linux, operating systems and the applications that run on them.

The work of the .NET team to port .NET Core to Linux has now enabled PowerShell to be ported to Linux as well. PowerShell on Linux is designed to enable customers to use the same tools to manage everything from anywhere. Windows and Linux teams, who may have had to work separately, can now work together more easily. It is initially available on Ubuntu, Centos, as well as Red Hat, and it also runs on Mac OS X. More platforms will be added in the future.

There are two big new things coming to PowerShell:

  1. We created a PowerShell Editor Service. This allows users to choose from a range of editors (VS Code and Sublime with others to follow) and get a great PowerShell authoring experience with Intellisense, debugging, etc.
  2. We will be extending the PowerShell Remoting Protocol (MS-PSRP) to use OpenSSH as a native transport. Users will have the option to use SSH or WINRM as a transport.

The initial release is an “alpha” and is community supported. In the future, we will deliver an official Microsoft released version of PowerShell based on open source to anyone running a supported version of Windows. You can download Alpha builds and check out the source code from GitHub. There is a Channel9 video on the PowerShell Open Source Project.