I have wanted to explore the topic of Continuous Integration (and particularly how it might apply to PowerShell) since reading the excellent Release Pipeline Model Whitepaper by Michael Greene and Steven Murawski.
I am relatively comfortable with Source Control (and it’s many benefits) and I’ve played a fair bit with Pester so I have a framework for testing. However I’ve struggled to understand how the “Build” or “Release” phases might apply to my (typically) administrative scripts. What eventually encouraged me to dig deeper was a friend suggesting I put my latest project in to the PowerShell Gallery and it therefore seemed sensible to have an automated process that would ensure committing to Github would also trigger a publish to the Gallery and (more importantly) that changes to both still resulted in clean, functional code.
–Confession time: I have published to the PowerShell Gallery once before with my AD Audit project. Since doing that I’ve almost certainly made changes to the project in Github and I recently accepted a (much appreciated) pull request, neither of which I remembered to push in to the Gallery. Additionally, I definitely didn’t perform any testing of the code after the latter.
AppVeyor
I recall looking at AppVeyor briefly before and dismissing it because I didn’t think there was a free option as well as I was typically working on scripts that I couldn’t easily open source.
There is a free option f..
Todo List
- I
mplement PSScriptAnalyzer in the pipeline. - Flesh out Pester tests (unit + integration - separate files?)
Implement deployment in to PSGalleryNeeds to factor in incrementing build #. Take that # from the build number used in AppVeyor? Be good if they match.
Implement Badge on readme.md- Blog about how the green tick next to the commits was already helpful :)
- Look in to using PSake – alternative to appveyor.yml as a build script?
- Merge together the 4 appveyor ps files? Need to then update the yml file.
make it so it only publishes the module if it’s changed. Work out best way to do this? Can we get some sort of hash?
Links
- http://stackoverflow.com/questions/41184979/how-to-publish-a-powershell-module-to-powershellgallery-with-appveyor
- http://ramblingcookiemonster.github.io/GitHub-Pester-AppVeyor/#appveyor
- http://ramblingcookiemonster.github.io/Github-Pester-AppVeyor-Part-2/
https://4sysops.com/archives/unit-tests-versus-integration-tests-in-pester/
https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/jtarquino/2016/10/15/powershell-module-with-continuous-integration-static-analysis-and-automatic-publish-to-gallery/
https://www.appveyor.com/docs/appveyor-yml/
https://ci.appveyor.com/project/markwragg/powershell-xkcd
http://javydekoning.com/getting-started-with-appveyor/