Using Powershell in Nextjournal

This notebook is a proof-of-concept showing that it’s possible to install and run Powershell on Nextjournal. The result is not an interactive Powershell cell however because we are still working on allowing users to provide their own runtimes using the Nextjournal runtime protocol.

Installation

The following Bash cell installs Powershell on Ubuntu 18.04 based on the instructions provided by Microsoft. We then export the Bash cell’s runtime environment so that other cells can make use of it with Powershell already installed. This is done via runtime settings which can be opened in the sidebar in Nextjournal’s editor.

# Download the Microsoft repository GPG keys
wget -q https://packages.microsoft.com/config/ubuntu/18.04/packages-microsoft-prod.deb

# Register the Microsoft repository GPG keys
dpkg -i packages-microsoft-prod.deb

# Update the list of products
apt-get update

# Provide add-apt-repository
sudo apt-get install -y software-properties-common

# Enable the "universe" repositories
add-apt-repository universe

# Install PowerShell
apt-get install -y powershell

38.7s

Powershell (Bash)

Running Powershell

Finally, we add another Bash cell and making it use our newly exported "Powershell" environment. Mind that this is not interactive in the typical sense of a shell at the moment but passing a Powershell command to pwsh and running the cell works.

pwsh -Command "Write-Host 'Hello, Powershell!'"

1.6s

Bash