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)

Things you must consider when pushing DSC configurations

Our example DSC configuration is pretty simple even if it worked well to showcase how to push DSC configurations. When DSC configurations become more complex, there are things you must take into consideration.

Up until now, we have been configuring settings or enabling software with DSC Resources that were already present on the target host. What if we tried to use text files and MSIs that were not present on the target node? In all our examples, we haven't had to actually do any work to get the files we want onto our target nodes. And herein lies the main problem with pushing DSC configurations. Nothing is done for us; we have to copy everything and ensure everything is present and accessible on the target nodes. So, what do we have to do for ourselves when pushing DSC configurations?

When pushing DSC configurations...