A package manager for PowerShell modules, written in Go
I use PowerShell extensively in my day-to-day work, but have always found the cmdlet structure tedious to have to remember and type in for each module that I have installed. There is also no way to easily check for updates on the modules I have installed on my system.
There are a few reasons why I decided to write this tool in Go:
- Because I wanted to.
- I know that sounds obnoxious, but I'm interested in Go and am learning Go, and figured that this would be a perfect opportunity to implement what I'm learning.
- Go can compile to a single binary and can also cross-compile to multiple operating systems and architectures.
- This helps ensure that I can share this tool with anyone, and if I've compiled it for their system/architecture, they can use it without having to worry about having Go or any other dependencies the code has installed.
- I eventually want to take advantage of Go's concurrency and parallelization patterns to make this process as snappy and efficient for PowerShell users as possible.
The goal is to try and mimic a Unix/Linux-style package manager (similar to APT, DNF, brew, etc.) to manage PowerShell modules and their lifecycle(s) (e.g., searching, installing, updating, removing, etc.) without having to type the individual cmdlets for each module every time.
The goal of this tool is to not have any other dependencies outside of making sure PowerShell is installed on your system. Once you've confirmed that PowerShell is installed, you just have to download poshman and you should be able to start using it without issue!
I'm currently developing this on a MacBook Pro, so most of the testing has been done on macOS. With that being said, the macOS commands should also work on Linux and Windows (PowerShell 7), considering that the PowerShell executable pwsh is the same name on these platforms. I'll be doing some additional testing to ensure support for Windows (Windows Powershell, AKA PowerShell 5.1, powershell.exe, and PowerShell 7, pwsh.exe), Linux, and macOS to ensure that this tool can be used by sysadmins on any platform that PowerShell is supported on.