Understanding PowerShell Profiles

I’ve been covering the relationship between PowerShell and the hosting application. One item I want to dive into deeper is the PowerShell profile script. This will probably take a few articles since I want to cover more than mere definitions. Once you understand the interaction between the host and PowerShell profiles, I believe you will get more out of your profile scripts. This is more important today, given that you can be running multiple versions of PowerShell on the same machine, not to mention applications like VS Code and the PowerShell ISE. There is a smart way to use PowerShell profile scripts so let’s dig in.

Host Profiles

As you know, when you do something in PowerShell, such as define an alias or map a PSDrive, that change only persists for the duration of your PowerShell session. That is the nature of PowerShell scope, which is probably another topic I’ll have to dive deeper into one day. But it would be a nuisance always to have to map the PSDrives you need every time you start a new PowerShell session. That’s where the profile script comes into the picture.