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.
- Press the windows-button on your keyboard.
- Type ‘PowerShell’
- Right-click Windows PowerShell
- Click Run as Administrator
- Run the following command and confirm with ‘Y’
Set-ExecutionPolicy -ExecutionPolicy RemoteSigned -Scope LocalMachineWe 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!