Recently I learnt that there have been many great advances in Powershell in recent years. This post is to highlight some of them to developers who may have also been turning a blind eye.
Powershell CORE exists, and it’s cross platform
I’m a bit late to the party with this one - it was announced in 2016. If you didn’t know, now you do, you can get more information on it https://github.com/PowerShell/PowerShell or you can install it with chocolately:
choco install powershell-core
Requires statements:
Powershell has an excellent #requires statement
The #Requires statement prevents a script from running unless the PowerShell version, modules (and version), or snap-ins (and version), and edition prerequisites are met. If the prerequisites aren’t met, PowerShell doesn’t run the script.
More information can be found on docs.microsoft.com.
Specifically I made heavy use of two statements, this gem specifies that the PowerShell session in which you’re running the script must be started with elevated user rights:
#requires -RunAsAdministrator
The following ensures the developer running your script is using Powershell Core
#requires -PSEdition Core
How to create powershell modules
You can create your own powershell modules. Here is some example code showing:
- Powershell module,
- Powershell module manifest
- Unit test (with mocks) using Pester.
Some links I found useful whilst developing:
- https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/scripting/developer/module/how-to-write-a-powershell-script-module?view=powershell-7.1
- https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/scripting/developer/module/how-to-write-a-powershell-module-manifest?view=powershell-7.1
- https://github.com/pester/Pester
VS Code:
VS Code has excellent support for Powershell Core.
You can select this from the version number in the lower right corner.