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)

Setting things up

Up until now, you could have gotten away with just looking at the examples in the book without running them or adapting them slightly to work on your desktop or a test VM or server. At this point, it is really helpful to have a test VM that you can create and destroy several times over as you work through the examples. This is especially true when we try executing DSC configurations remotely later in the chapter.

Test environment

There are several approaches you can take when building and using test environments. If you have spare physical machines, you can set up several machines as test servers to run these configurations. This is the easiest way if you have the extra hardware lying around, but it becomes...