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)

Tooling

DSC supports applying DSC configurations locally and remotely using the Start-DSCConfiguration cmdlet. This cmdlet handles both the copying of the MOF file to the target node and telling DSC to execute the MOF on the target node.

Start-DSCConfiguration can be invoked interactively as well as be run in the background. Interactive executions are run as we are watching and are able to show verbose output as each step in the DSC configuration happens. Background executions are PowerShell jobs that do not block your shell so that you can do other things while the job runs. This means you can use this cmdlet to push a DSC configuration and then walk away or continue to use your current PowerShell console session to do other things as it executes on the target node.

All output from the DSC configuration execution is logged by DSC, and the Start-DSCConfiguration cmdlet can show...