Installing PowerShell Core on Raspbian (Raspberry Pi)

PowerShell Core is a version of PowerShell that can be installed on Windows, Mac OS X (I covered it here) and Linux, i.e. Raspbian. For this blog post I am going to using my Raspberry Pi 4 and Raspbian (Buster).

“PowerShell is a task automation and configuration management framework from Microsoft, consisting of a command-line shell and associated scripting language.”

If you want to play with Microsoft Azure then you’ll want to take the PowerShell command line for a test drive as it can be better than the GUI driven web interface, and on Linux that means installing PowerShell Core.

First up, make sure to run sudo apt-get update.

Next up we use wget to download the archive file that contains PowerShell Core for Raspbian.

wget https://github.com/PowerShell/PowerShell/releases/download/v6.2.0/powershell-6.2.0-linux-arm32.tar.gz

Note: Check https://github.com/PowerShell/PowerShell to check what the latest version is.

Once the archive file is download we need a location to extract it into.

mkdir ~/powershell

mkdir makes a directory, ~/ places it at the root of the folder tree and in this case the folder will be called powershell.

tar -xvf ./powershell-6.2.0-linux-arm32.tar.gz -C ~/powershell

The tar -xvf command extracts (-x) the file (f) verbosely (v) and copies it to the ~/powershell folder.

With all that complete, it’s time to run PowerShell Core.

~/powershell/pswsh

pswsh is PowerShell Core and it should now open.

To check which version is installed type:

$psversiontable

With PowerShell Core installed and running the Azure module can be installed.