How do I recreate PowerShell $profile variable? It's empty in a custom Host

Question

If you implement a custom PowerShell Host with System.Management.Automation (SMA), all of the automatic variables are avaialable, except it seems that $PROFILE is empty. How would one go about recreating it?

Is it always in UserProfile + \Documents\WindowsPowerShell\Microsoft.PowerShell_profile.ps1? Or do I need to be worried about it being in other places?

To clarify, I only care about CurrentUserCurrentHost profile.

Details

Given this PowerShell script:

Write-Output "_Profiles_" 
Write-Output "CurrentUserCurrentHost = '$($Profile.CurrentUserCurrentHost)'"
Write-Output "CurrentUserAllHosts = '$($Profile.CurrentUserAllHosts)'"
Write-Output "AllUsersCurrentHost = '$($Profile.AllUsersCurrentHost)'"
Write-Output "AllUsersAllHosts = '$($Profile.AllUsersAllHosts)'"

Running it against system PowerShell has the following output:

_Profiles_
CurrentUserCurrentHost = 'C:\Users\rob\Documents\WindowsPowerShell\Microsoft.PowerShell_profile.ps1'
CurrentUserAllHosts = 'C:\User\rob\Documents\WindowsPowerShell\profile.ps1'
AllUsersCurrentHost = 'C:\Windows\System32\WindowsPowerShell\v1.0\Microsoft.PowerShell_profile.ps1'
AllUsersAllHosts = 'C:\Windows\System32\WindowsPowerShell\v1.0\profile.ps1'

Running it with a Custom C# PowerShell Host (a System.Management.Automation.Host.PSHost implementation) shows:

_Profiles_
CurrentUserCurrentHost = ''
CurrentUserAllHosts = ''
AllUsersCurrentHost = ''
AllUsersAllHosts = ''

Background

https://github.com/chocolatey/choco/issues/667

This has been tested in PowerShell v3 / System.Managment.Automation (SMA) v3 but it could easily be proven out in other PowerShell versions.

It can be in other places. Running from ISE gives "C:\Users\David\Documents\WindowsPowerShell\Microsoft.PowerShellISE_profile.ps1" — David Gardiner
I saw that ISE is different, but I don't really worry about ISE's profile. IMHO the important one is the main PowerShell profile setting. — ferventcoder
What about launching the real PowerShell console and asking that to dump out the value? powershell.exe -command "& {``$profile}" — David Gardiner
Not a bad idea. Starting up a PowerShell takes a hit though. — ferventcoder

ferventcoder ferventcoder · Accepted Answer · 2016-03-26T22:13:08

As a possible fix, this is what I've come up with. However it does mean that $profile is always expected to be in the Documents folder.

var documentsFolder = Environment.GetFolderPath(Environment.SpecialFolder.MyDocuments, Environment.SpecialFolderOption.DoNotVerify);
var currentUserCurrentHostProfile = _fileSystem.combine_paths(documentsFolder, "WindowsPowerShell\\Microsoft.PowerShell_profile.ps1");

var profileFix = @"
if ((Test-Path(""{0}"")) -and ($profile -eq $null -or $profile -eq '')) {{
  $global:profile = ""{1}""
}}
".format_with(documentsFolder, currentUserCurrentHostProfile);

pipeline.Commands.Add(new Command(profileFix, isScript: true, useLocalScope: false));

This is done this way due to special accounts like LocalSystem that would not have a profile folder.

Note: .format_with is a string formatter, so the {{ and }} you see will be converted to { and } when it finishes the string formatting.

How do I recreate PowerShell $profile variable? It's empty in a custom Host

Details

Background

1 Answers