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 up a common installation base

With all your target machines up and configured for remote access, you move on to looking at what your common base installation should look like. Since you've been doing this stuff manually by yourself for a long while, you know by heart what needs to be installed on every server and configured.

Looking back at this book as you go, you jump right into making a DSC configuration for your base setup. Since the custom software your company develops uses Roman names for code names for releases, you decide to name your configuration Pantheon and author the following DSC configuration script:

    Configuration PantheonDeployment
    {
      Import-DscResource -Module xRemoteDesktopAdmin
      Import-DscResource -Module xTimeZone
      Import-DscResource -Module xComputerManagement
      Import-DscResource -Module xSystemSecurity
    
     ...