Creating Self Contained Executable

psburn can also build self contained executables, means that you need not to install powershell on every system. It uses powershell core to do this. For making self contained executables the main recipe is a zip file which contains os specific powershell core binaries.

Preparing A Zip

You can download the latest binary archives of powershell core of your system from official github repository of powershell.

Windows

Invoke-WebRequest https://github.com/PowerShell/PowerShell/releases/download/v7.1.3/PowerShell-7.1.3-win-x64.zip -o PowerShell-7.1.3-win-x64.zip

After downloading the binary archive you will have to extract all files inside a directory named pwsh.

Expand-Archive -Path PowerShell-7.1.3-win-x64.zip -DestinationPath pwsh

Linux

wget https://github.com/PowerShell/PowerShell/releases/download/v7.1.3/powershell-7.1.3-linux-x64.tar.gz -O powershell-7.1.3-linux-x64.tar.gz

After downloading the binary archive you will have to extract all files inside a directory named pwsh.

mkdir pwsh && tar -xf powershell-7.1.3-linux-x64.tar.gz -C pwsh

MacOS

wget https://github.com/PowerShell/PowerShell/releases/download/v7.1.3/powershell-7.1.3-osx-x64.tar.gz -O powershell-7.1.3-osx-x64.tar.gz

After downloading the binary archive you will have to extract all files inside a folder named pwsh.

mkdir pwsh && tar -xf powershell-7.1.3-osx-x64.tar.gz -C pwsh

You should attain this type of directory structure.

pwsh/
    *.dll     # dll files.
    *.so      # lib files.
    *.exe     # exe files.
    ...       # other files and folders.

Now compress pwsh directory into a zip file.

Windows

Compress-Archive -Path pwsh -DestinationPath pwsh.zip

Linux/MacOS

zip -r pwsh.zip pwsh 

Building Executable

psburn create script.ps1 --self-contained
psburn build script.ps1 script.cs -p pwsh.zip

Note

Zip compression level can make executable large or small size for only c# builds.

Note

Use --onedir flag in all commands for faster booting time of packaged scripts.