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)

Debugging and troubleshooting configuration script files

So, you ran a DSC configuration against a target node using either Start-DscConfiguration or a Pull Server and you want to look at the logs for its execution; where do you go? If you ran it with Start-DscConfiguration and the verbose parameter, then you have a log in your console, but that goes away when you close your console and you don't have this available with a Pull Server.

Worry not, for DSC provides a rich set of information from each operation it performs, although it's not always easy to access this information.

Status at a glance

A new feature for WMF 5 is storing status information in each target node which helps in identifying the current status...