I have been using PowerShell Core for a while now, its great not to have to spin up a windows VM every time I want to work with PowerShell on Mac!

Let’s face it though, not everything is there at the moment, so every time there is an update I want to know. The Microsoft team are doing a great job of updating PowerShell Core and it seems like every time I go check there is a new version which fixes bug or introduces new cmdlets.

This does however mean I need to constantly go check the releases page or keep an eye on twitter to see when new releases come out.. until now!

The following function is a 5 minute function I wrote to keep on top of the updates, I have placed it in my PowerShell profile and now every time I launch PowerShell from my mac it checks and tells me if there is a new version as below:

Code

Just use the following code and paste it into the file located at $profile and every time you launch PowerShell it will go check for you!

Function Get-PowerShellRelease { #Using this to get rid of the nasty output Invoke-WebRequest gives you in PowerShell on the Mac $progress = $ProgressPreference $ProgressPreference = "SilentlyContinue" $JSON = Invoke-WebRequest "https://api.github.com/repos/powershell/powershell/releases/latest"| ConvertFrom-Json If ($psversiontable.GitCommitId) { If ($JSON.tag_name -ne $psversiontable.GitCommitId) { Write-Output "New version of PowerShell available!" $JSON.body } Else { "PowerShell is currently up to date!" } } $ProgressPreference = $progress } Get-PowerShellRelease

-Alan

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