• Automation,  Azure,  Powershell

    Publish module to Powershell Gallery from Azure Pipelines

    Now that I have my module on Github and built the module on Azure Pipelines, I want to publish it to the Powershell Gallery. The first step it of course to create a free account; once you have the account you can head to your profile, click on API Keys and then Create: The Create dialog allows to choose the key name, the expiration and very important, the scope (what permission the key will have on the Gallery) and which packages the key is allowed to control through Global Pattern. In my case I want the key to expire every year, I want the key to grant permission to publish new packages and update existing ones and I want this key to be used only for LSE modules: notice I used LSE* as Global Pattern, this way this same key will allow me to publish and manage new packages as long as their name begins with LSE. Azure Pipelines allows to securely store secrets (passwords and keys) as variables, if you want to do so you can use the Variables tab in your Pipeline then click the padlock icon: Anyway I prefer to store the key in Azure KeyVault since…

  • Automation,  Azure,  Powershell

    Test Azure custom modules with Pester

    Before I go too far along with building my LSECosmos module I must add proper tests. Just as a quick refresher (or to get some context if you’re not familiar with the concept), here are some pointers about Test Driven Development and Unit Testing: Test Driven Development (Wikipedia) Unit Testing (Wikipedia) Software Testing Fundamentals While it is relatively straightforward to test simple scripts (we would likely manually run the script testing a 2-3 core scenarios to make sure nothing terrible happens), things can get complicated fairly quickly with longer scripts or modules, especially when they are using a variety of cmdlets to take actions (think about Azure resources for example, or any other system-wide on-prem operation), need to pass data and objects back and forth between calls and so on. If you have written enough lines of code (no matter the language/tool you use), I bet you can remember at least one occasion where you decided to make an apparently small and innocent change to a well working piece of software an all hell broke loose 😵. I recently came across this meme on Facebook, it sums it up nicely 😅 (thanks to CodeChef for sharing): At its core proper…