Question

Is there a good technical or other reason why the MS hard-coded the Documents folder as the default location for WindowsPowerShell? MS has been criticized for too much configuration over convention in the past (WCF?), but a case can be made for more configuration in PowerShell. I, and I presume most developers, like to keep their development work centralized in a separate folder or volume away from personal and system files.

For instance, if you install PoshGit, it will install itself in C:\Users\Your Name\WindowsPowerShell\Modules. I don’t want it to install itself there but in my own development partition d:\Dev\PowerShellScripts. There’s no environment variable that controls this location.

Is there a reason for this or I just don’t get it?

Answer 1

Can you explain yourself a bit more.

According to my understanding PowerShell.exe interpreter base directory is the one defined by $env:HOMEDRIVE, $env:HOMEPATH, that can be change using the user profile.

As shown in the screen shots here under :

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Edited :

Ok, the screenshot comes from the user property in Active Directory MMC, you’ve got a simplest one in your windows seven user properties. But this has nothing to do with your problem.

Your problem is around the module installation. The think that you have to know is that Modules can be installed quite everywhere (even on a shared directory with some tricks). By default the environnement variable $env:PSModulePath points to the paths where Get-Module -ListAvailable look for them. So you can add d:\Dev\PowerShellScripts\Modules in this path and then copy the subfolder of C:\Users\Your Name\WindowsPowerShell\Modules created by PoshGit inside your Modules directory and it should work. Modules as opposite to Snapins don’t need to be registered.

Now the reason why PoshGit choose to put module in user profile, raser than let you choose the place is PoshGit installer problem.

For more explanations read about Modules and about_environment_variables.