Installing PowerShell 7

Windows

Windows includes Windows PowerShell 5.1 (the blue "Windows PowerShell" app). Install PowerShell 7 alongside it — they don't conflict:

winget install --id Microsoft.PowerShell --source winget

Or download the installer (.msi) from the PowerShell GitHub releases page, or install it from the Microsoft Store. PowerShell 7 starts with the pwsh command; Windows PowerShell 5.1 with powershell.

macOS

brew install powershell/tap/powershell

Linux

Microsoft publishes packages for Ubuntu, Debian, RHEL, and others (see learn.microsoft.com/powershell), and there's a Snap package: sudo snap install powershell --classic.

Check the version

# illustrative
$PSVersionTable.PSVersion

Major  Minor  Patch  PreReleaseLabel BuildLabel
-----  -----  -----  --------------- ----------
7      6      6

Any 7.x version works for this course. Version 7.4 and 7.6 are long-term support (LTS) releases, supported for three years.

Windows PowerShell 5.1 vs PowerShell 7

Most scripts work in both, but PowerShell 7 adds features used in this course — such as the ternary operator (? :), null-coalescing (??), and ForEach-Object -Parallel.