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)

Defining a DSC configuration data file

In the previous sections, we covered using DSC configuration script files with DSC configuration data, but we have not covered exactly how to specify configuration data or how it is stored separately from the configuration scripts. In this section, we will cover this and the rules applying to what configuration data can be specified as well as some best practices on using it.

When we refer to DSC configuration data, we are referring to any environmental data supplied to the DSC configuration function. This may be slightly confusing, as we mentioned a DSC special variable called $ConfigurationData earlier in this chapter. Try to remember that when we refer to the DSC configuration data term, we are referring to the entirety of the data supplied to the configuration function, not just the data available through the special variable called ...