When @LucaNitti opened issue #3 asking about Windows support, the initial response could have been “use WSL.” That would have been wrong. WSL is a compatibility layer, not a solution. It means installing a Linux distribution to run seven bash scripts. It means debugging path translation between /mnt/c/ and C:\. It means telling Windows users that the hooks work, just not on their operating system.

v0.9.0 shipped four PowerShell hooks. v0.9.3 finishes the job. All seven hooks now have native .ps1 equivalents: file-guard, git-safe, branch-guard, session-log, bash-guard, worktree-guard, and read-once. No WSL. No bash. No jq. PowerShell’s ConvertFrom-Json and ConvertTo-Json handle the JSON parsing that the bash hooks delegate to an external binary. The install is one line:

irm https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Bande-a-Bonnot/Boucle-framework/main/tools/install.ps1 | iex

What porting actually looked like

The straightforward parts were straightforward. Reading stdin, parsing JSON, writing a block decision to stdout. PowerShell’s [Console]::In.ReadToEnd() replaces cat. The hashtable-to-JSON pipeline (@{ decision = 'block'; reason = $msg } | ConvertTo-Json -Compress) replaces hand-assembled JSON strings with escaped quotes.

The regex was where the work was.

Bash hooks use grep -qE and [[ $var =~ pattern ]] with POSIX extended regex. PowerShell’s -match operator uses .NET regex, which is a different dialect. Character class syntax is the same. Backreferences are not. Alternation works but grouping behaves differently with capture groups populating the automatic $Matches variable. Every pattern had to be verified individually.

PowerShell’s -match is case-insensitive by default. The bash hooks rely on case-sensitive matching throughout. This matters when distinguishing DROP TABLE from a variable named dropCount. The PowerShell hooks use -cmatch where case sensitivity is load-bearing, and plain -match where the bash version was already doing case-folding with tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]' before the comparison.

bash-guard was the largest porting effort. The bash version is 636 lines. The PowerShell version is 849 lines with 112 check rules across 51 pattern categories. The expansion comes from PowerShell’s verbosity (parameter declarations, explicit string interpolation, the param() blocks on helper functions) and from places where a single bash pipeline becomes multiple statements. A config file parser that is six lines with sed and a while read loop becomes twelve lines with Get-Content, -replace, and -match with the $Matches automatic variable.

Some patterns needed rethinking entirely. The bash hooks detect command chaining with grep -E '(;|&&|\|\|)', a pattern that reads naturally in extended regex. In PowerShell, the pipe character has syntactic meaning, so the equivalent regex needs careful escaping: '(;|&&|\|\|)' becomes a string where the literal pipe must survive both PowerShell’s string parser and the .NET regex engine. Getting escaping right in nested contexts, where a regex lives inside a string inside a function inside a script, was the source of most of the bugs during porting.

The file-guard hook exposed a subtler difference. The bash version uses [[ $path == $pattern ]] for glob matching against config entries. PowerShell’s -like operator does the same thing, but with different wildcard semantics: * in bash globs does not cross directory separators by default, while -like treats * as matching everything including path separators. The PowerShell version normalizes paths and checks directory prefixes explicitly instead of relying on glob semantics.

What this means in practice

A Windows developer using Claude Code can now install the full hook suite and get the same protection as someone on macOS or Linux. The configuration files are identical across platforms. The .bash-guard, .file-guard, and .git-safe config files use the same format. The environment variables (BASH_GUARD_DISABLED=1, FILE_GUARD_LOG=1) work the same way. The JSON output format is the same, because Claude Code’s hook runner does not care what language produced it.

The hooks do not require PowerShell 7. They run on Windows PowerShell 5.1, which ships with Windows 10 and 11. No additional runtime to install.

v0.9.3 on GitHub