Standalone scripts that reproduce the C++ toolchain found on GitHub Actions runner images on your own machines, VMs, or bare-metal servers — without building a full runner image.

GitHub Actions runner images ship a rich C++ development environment (MSVC, Clang, GCC, CMake, Ninja, MinGW, vcpkg, …). When you need to replicate that environment outside of GitHub Actions — for a self-hosted builder, a developer workstation, a CI appliance, or an offline lab — you normally have to reverse- engineer what the image provisioner installed. These scripts do that work up front, following the same toolset definitions used by the official images.

The toolset JSON files (toolset-*.json) are derived from the toolset definitions in the actions/runner-images repository (images/windows/toolsets/ and images/ubuntu/toolsets/). The installation scripts read only the C++-relevant sections of those definitions, mirroring the logic of the official provisioning scripts as closely as practical.

The default Clang version is set via update-alternatives so that clang, clang++, clang-format, and clang-tidy all point to the right binary out of the box.

Same as Windows Server 2022 with these differences:

• Only Windows 11 SDK 10.0.26100 (no Win10 SDK)
• Windows Driver Kit is not installed
• DriverKit VS component (Component.Microsoft.Windows.DriverKit) is excluded

The new Install-CppDevEnvironment-Windows11.ps1 script targets Windows 11 workstations (client OS). It installs the same developer toolset as the Windows Server scripts (Visual Studio workloads, Chocolatey packages, MinGW/MSYS2, vcpkg, LLVM, CMake, Ninja), but with client-appropriate defaults and optional features. Use toolset-win11.json alongside the script to customize the installed components.

PowerShell 7 is required. If it is not already installed, run the helper script first:

sudo bash install-powershell-ubuntu.sh

The installation script must be run as root or with sudo; it calls sudo internally when not already root.

PowerShell 7 (pwsh.exe) is required — not the built-in Windows PowerShell 5 (powershell.exe). If it is not already installed, run the helper script from an elevated command prompt:

install-powershell-windows.cmd

The installation script must be run from an elevated PowerShell session (Run as Administrator).

# With default toolset (toolset-2404.json next to the script)
sudo pwsh -File Install-CppDevEnvironment-Ubuntu2404.ps1

# With an explicit toolset path
sudo pwsh -File Install-CppDevEnvironment-Ubuntu2404.ps1 -ToolsetPath /path/to/toolset-2404.json

pwsh.exe -File Install-CppDevEnvironment-Windows2022.ps1

pwsh.exe -File Install-CppDevEnvironment-Windows2025.ps1

pwsh.exe -File Install-CppDevEnvironment-Windows11.ps1

All installation steps are safe to re-run:

• Chocolatey and already-installed choco packages are skipped automatically.
• The Visual Studio installer updates an existing installation rather than installing a second copy.
• MSYS2 installation is skipped if C:\msys64 already exists.
• vcpkg is not re-cloned if the target directory already exists.
• Ubuntu packages are installed with apt-get install, which is a no-op for packages already at the requested version.

MIT License -- see the LICENSE file.