Announcing PowerShell 7.1

Joey Aiello

November 11th, 20209 0

We’re proud to announce the release of PowerShell 7.1, the latest major update to PowerShell 7. This release includes a number of improvements and fixes that build on top of the PowerShell 7.0 release in March and the recent GA release of .NET 5. Since then, the PowerShell Team (and many of you, our community contributors, thank you!) have been hard at work addressing some of the community’s top bug reports and feature requests.

What’s new in PowerShell 7.1?

For PowerShell 7.1, we decided to build on the foundation established in PowerShell 7.0 with a strong focus on community issues, especially where we could make additive changes and quality-of-life improvements without introducing instability or breaking changes. As a platform with over 115 million sessions per month, we’re absolutely committed to ensuring that PowerShell remains a stable and performant platform, even after significant version upgrades like 7.1.

For more details about what’s been added and fixed, make sure to check out the PowerShell 7.1 release notes.

Where can I get the latest version?

Our latest releases can always be found within the GitHub Releases for PowerShell.

For the first time, on Windows 10, you can also now pick up the latest version of PowerShell on the Microsoft Store.

More information on how to install across various platforms and architectures can be found at https://aka.ms/Install-PowerShell.

Why should I upgrade to PowerShell 7?

PowerShell 7 is the modern, cross-platform edition of PowerShell built on top of .NET 5+ (formerly .NET Core). PowerShell 7 offers cross-platform support on Linux, macOS, and Windows, SSH-based remoting, parallelization, Docker containers, new operators and language features, and a massive long tail of small improvements and bug fixes.

If you’re still primarily a Windows PowerShell user, and you’re interested to learn more about the benefits and mechanics of moving to PowerShell 7, check out this doc on upgrading from Windows PowerShell to PowerShell 7.

What operating systems and distributions does PowerShell 7.1 support?

PowerShell 7.1 supports a wide variety of operating systems and platforms including:

  • Windows 8.1/10 (including ARM64)
  • Windows Server 2012 R2, 2016, 2019, and Semi-Annual Channel (SAC)
  • Ubuntu 16.04/18.04/20.04 (including ARM64)
  • Ubuntu 19.10 (via Snap package)
  • Debian 9/10
  • CentOS and RHEL 7/8
  • Fedora 30
  • Alpine 3.11+ (including ARM64)
  • macOS 10.13+

We also have community support for:

  • Arch Linux
  • Raspbian Linux
  • Kali Linux

Support lifecycle

PowerShell 7.1 is supported under the Microsoft Modern Lifecycle Policy for the same support timeline as .NET 5: currently 3 months after the release of .NET 6 in roughly one year.

This is in contrast to the PowerShell 7.0, an LTS release that will be supported until December of 2022.

For more information on the PowerShell 7 support lifecycle and requirements, check out https://aka.ms/PSLifecycle.

What else has the PowerShell Team been working on?

Over the last 6-12 months, you may have noticed that some of the more interesting new PowerShell Team functionality is being developed outside of the PowerShell repository within the PowerShell GitHub organization. In upholding our commitment to stability within the PowerShell language runtime, we’re doing as much of our fresh and experimental outside of the primary PowerShell project. Most of this work will live on the PowerShell Gallery, but some may eventually find its way back into the PowerShell project once the PowerShell Team is confident that it’s stable enough to reach the high stability bar that PowerShell 7 necessitates.

Some of these other projects and repositories include

Keep your eyes peeled on the PowerShell Team blog and @PowerShell_Team account on Twitter for more updates, previews, and developments on these efforts.

How can I give feedback

Please file issues in the PowerShell repository on GitHub to let us know about any features you’d like added or bugs that you encounter. Additionally, you can join us for the PowerShell Community Call on the 3rd Thursday of every month. The Community Call is a great opportunity to talk directly to the team, hear about the latest developments in PowerShell, and to voice your opinions into ongoing feature design.

And as always, we accept code, test, and documentation contributions in the form of pull requests on GitHub. If you’re interested in helping out on the project, check out our contribution guide.

Until next time!

Joey Aiello Program Manager, PowerShell

Joey Aiello Program Manager, PowerShell Core