Microsoft Snaps PowerShell

By Swapnil Bhartiya

You can now install PowerShell on Ubuntu using a Snap package.

“Talk is easy; show me the code,” said Linux creator Linus Torvalds. Microsoft’s Linux presence has undergone a gradual revolution since the company proclaimed its love for Linux in 2015. The company took another step recently by announcing that it is packaging PowerShell Core as an Ubuntu Snap.

Snap is Canonical’s attempt at a containerized package system. Modern containerized package systems contain isolated images that can be installed without worrying about dependencies and impacts on the system and other applications. Although Microsoft already pre-packaged binaries of PowerShell for Linux, putting PowerShell in a snap will bring additional convenience for users.

As Joey Aiello of Microsoft explains in a blog post, because Snap packages carry all of their own dependencies, you don’t need to worry about specific versions of shared libraries installed on your machine. Also, Snap packages can be installed without giving the publisher root access to the host. Snap packages won’t interact with other applications or system files without your permission, and updates to Snaps happen automatically. An update includes the delta of changes since the last update.

If you are not an Ubuntu user, you can get .deb and .rpm packages from PowerShell’s GitHub page. And since PowerShell is fully open source, you can compile it for your own distribution.

07/31/2018