Book Image

Learning PowerShell DSC - Second Edition

By : James Pogran
Book Image

Learning PowerShell DSC - Second Edition

By: James Pogran

Overview of this book

The main goal of this book is to teach you to configure, deploy, and manage your system using the new features of PowerShell v5/v6 DSC. This book begins with the basics of PowerShell Desired State Configuration, covering its architecture and components. It familiarizes you with the set of Windows PowerShell language extensions and new Windows PowerShell commands that make up DSC. Then it helps you create DSC custom resources and work with DSC configurations with the help of practical examples. Finally, it describes how to deploy configuration data using PowerShell DSC. Throughout this book, we will be focusing on concepts such as building configurations with parameters, the local configuration manager, and testing and restoring configurations using PowerShell DSC. By the end of the book, you will be able to deploy a real-world application end-to-end and will be familiar enough with the powerful Desired State Configuration platform to achieve continuous delivery and efficiently and easily manage and deploy data for systems.
Table of Contents (9 chapters)

The general workflow

In Chapter 1, Introducing PowerShell DSC, we covered a high-level overview of DSC and introduced the three phases of DSC use. We also covered the MOF file and its importance in the grand scheme of DSC usage. Since we have already established the "why" of these concepts, we will now dive into the details of each phase.

What follows won't be a step-by-step process; this will be handled in Chapter 3, DSC Configuration Files. Instead, what we discuss here will be more explanatory and might make you move around a bit. Concepts that are introduced may not be fully explained until later, when supporting concepts are fleshed out. DSC is a very modular product, each module a separate entity that is also interdependent with other entities. This makes explaining some concepts a chicken and egg scenario, so we will try our best to reference other sections...