Solved: “running scripts is disabled on this system” in PowerShell

Since I intensively started using Visual Studio Code across my devices, with PowerShell as my main terminal, I started running into the following error quite a lot:

<file> cannot be loaded because running scripts is disabled on this system. For more information, see about_Execution_Policies at https:/go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=135170.

What’s happening here, is that your computer is preventing you from running potentially harmful scripts. This safety mechanism can broadly be configured on three levels: for your computer, for a user or for a particular session. These safety mechanisms are execution policies.

It’s good to know that you can bypass this safety mechanism by copying the code from a script and running it manually in a PowerShell terminal. So execution policies do not block the code, but they make sure you don’t unintentionally run malicious scripts.

However, there’s a more conventional way. You can relax the execution policies, by taking these simple steps.

1. Press the windows-button on your keyboard.
2. Type ‘PowerShell’
3. Right-click Windows PowerShell
4. Click Run as Administrator
5. Run the following command and confirm with ‘Y’

Set-ExecutionPolicy -ExecutionPolicy RemoteSigned -Scope LocalMachine

We have changed the execution policies to allow local and remote signed scripts and we have done this for the scope of your machine. Conclusion: You can now run PowerShell scripts on your computer.

Great success!