The goal of PowerShell Core is to be the ubiquitous language for managing your assets in the hybrid cloud. That’s why we’ve worked to make it available on many operating systems, architectures, and flavors of Linux, macOS, and Windows as possible.

Today, we’re happy to announce an addition to our support matrix: PowerShell Core is now available as a Snap package.

What’s a Snap package?

Snap packages are containerized applications that can be installed on many Linux distributions. For more info, check out Canonical’s blog on our Snap announcement.

What does this do for me?

Snap packages have a number of benefits over traditional Linux software packages (e.g. DEB or RPM):

Snap packages carry all of their own dependencies, so you don’t need to worry about the specific versions of shared libraries installed on your machine

Snap packages can be installed without giving the publisher root access to the host

Snap packages are “safe to run” as they don’t interact with other applications or system files without your permission

Updates to Snaps happen automatically, and include the delta of changes between updates

How do I get it?

First, you need to make sure you’ve installed snapd.

Then, just run:

snap install powershell --classic

Now you’ve got PowerShell Core installed as a Snap! Simply start pwsh from your favorite terminal, and you’re in!

Interested in our latest preview bits?

If you live on the bleeding edge and want to grab the latest PowerShell preview, just install powershell-preview instead of powershell :

snap install powershell-preview --classic

Now you can launch PowerShell Core’s latest preview as a Snap by launching pwsh-preview from your terminal.

What about your other Linux packages?

We will continue to support our “traditional” standalone Linux packages that ship on https://packages.microsoft.com/, and we have no plans to discontinue that support.

However, we highly encourage you to check out the Snap package as a way to simplify your updates and reduce the permission set required for installation.

Happy Snapping!

Joey Aiello PM, PowerShell