PowerShell 6.0 has now become generally available and with it the ability to use PowerShell cross platform. With all of its goodness, I was most excited about Azure powershell cross platform capabilities that this brings about. Firstly, the azure-cli is also a great cross platform tool, but sometimes the powershell capabilities seem to outshine this CLI.

Installing PowerShell on macOS

The installation instructions on the repo are pretty straight forward, but for summary:

1. Ensure you have homebrew. This can be installed by running /usr/bin/ruby -e "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/master/install)"
2. Install Homebrew-Cask brew tap caskroom/cask
3. Install PowerShell brew cask install powershell

Installing Azure PowerShell

Azure Powershell is available from the PowerShell Gallery and can first entering powershell by running pwsh from your bash prompt and then:

Install-Module -Name AzureRM.Netcore

Login-AzureRmAccount
# Login via browser devicelogin

# Ensure it's working by grabbing your resource groups
Get-AzureRmResourceGroup

PowerShell bash alias

When launching powershell from bash, I’d prefer to use the full name rather than pwsh. As such in my bash_profile I have the following:

if [ -x $(command -v pwsh) ]; then
    alias powershell=pwsh
fi

Now you can enter powershell any time by running powershell

PowerShell as your default shell

You can make PowerShell your default shell instead of bash in terminal. To do this, open Terminal preferences (cmd + ,) and under the ‘General’ tab change ‘Shells open with:’ to Command and use ‘/usr/local/bin/pwsh’