With the release of PowerShellGet 1.6.0 , PowerShellGet cmdlets and the PowerShell Gallery have added support for prerelease strings for prerelease versions of modules and scripts. You can now publish items to the PowerShell Gallery with a version like 1.0.0-alpha, and you can download items identified as a prerelease. Items can be filtered using prerelease version strings, in both the Gallery UI and via Find-* cmdlets.

Before this feature, if publishers wished to publish a prerelease version of an item, they had to use a version lower than 1.0.0 (ex. 0.0.1). This meant it was not possible to publish a prerelease version of a 2.0.0 item. The other workaround was to change the name of the item to contain the word “prerelease” (ex. MyAwesomeModule-Prerelease), but that required code changes for users when the production version was ready, because it changed the name of the item.