Skip to content

Add initial draft #388

New issue

Have a question about this project? Sign up for a free GitHub account to open an issue and contact its maintainers and the community.

By clicking “Sign up for GitHub”, you agree to our terms of service and privacy statement. We’ll occasionally send you account related emails.

Already on GitHub? Sign in to your account

Draft
wants to merge 6 commits into
base: master
Choose a base branch
from
Draft
Changes from all commits
Commits
File filter

Filter by extension

Filter by extension

Conversations
Failed to load comments.
Loading
Jump to
Jump to file
Failed to load files.
Loading
Diff view
Diff view
79 changes: 79 additions & 0 deletions Draft-Accepted/RFC0066-PowerShell-User-Content-Location.md
Original file line number Diff line number Diff line change
@@ -0,0 +1,79 @@
---
RFC: RFC0066
Author: Justin Chung
Status: Draft
SupercededBy: N/A
Version: 1.0
Area: Core
Comments Due: 05/03/2025
Plan to implement: Yes
---

# PowerShell User Content Location

This RFC proposes moving the current PowerShell user content location out of OneDrive to the AppData directory on Windows machines.

## Motivation

- PowerShell currently places profile, modules, and configuration files in the user's Documents folder, which is against established conventions for shell configurations and tools.
- PowerShell content files in OneDrive can lead to unwanted syncing of module files, leading to various issues.
- There is strong community demand for changing this behavior as the current setup is problematic for many users.
- Changing the default location would align PowerShell with other developer tools and improve usability.

As a user,
I can customize the location where PowerShell user content is installed,
so that I can avoid problems created by file sync solutions like OneDrive.

## User Experience

- On startup PowerShell will create a directory in AppData and a configuration file.
- In the configuration file the user scoped PSModulePath will point to AppData/PowerShell/Modules.
- Users can opt out of this new location by specifying a desired user scoped module path in the configuration file.

## Specification

- The content folder location change will only apply to PowerShell on Windows.
- Configurability of the content folder will apply to all systems.
- This will be an experimental feature.
- The PowerShell user content folder will be located in the `$env:LOCALAPPDATA\Microsoft\PowerShell`.
- A configuration file in the PowerShell user content folder will determine the location of the user scoped PSModulePath.
- The user will be responsible for specifying thier desired install location using PSResourceGet.
- The location of Modules is configurable
- The location of this folder is not configurable.
- The proposed directory structure:

C:\Users\UserName\AppData\Local\PowerShell\
├── PSContent (Configurable)
└── PSModulePathConfig.json (Not Configurable)

PSContent (Configurable)
├── Scripts (Not Configurable)
├── Modules (Not Configurable)
├── Help (Not Configurable)
└── profile.ps1 (Not Configurable)

- The configuration file:

```json
{
"UserPSContentPath" : "C:\\Users\\User\\PowerShell"
}
```

## Alternate Proposals and Considerations

- The following functionalities will be affected:
- SecretManagement
- SecretManagement extension vaults are registered for the current user context in:
`$env:LOCALAPPDATA\Microsoft\PowerShell\secretmanagement\secretvaultregistry\`

When an extension vault is registered, SecretManagement stores the full path to the extension
module in the registry. Moving the PowerShell content to a new location will break the vault
registrations.
- Use the following script to relocate the PowerShell contents folder:

```pwsh
$newPath = "C:\Custom\PowerShell\Modules"
$currentUserModulePath = [System.Environment]::GetFolderPath('MyDocuments') + "\PowerShell\Modules"
Move-Item -Path $currentUserModulePath -Destination $newPath -Force
```