Power Up Your “Level Up” with the Right Tools

Ultimate PowerShell
Level-up Guide

Power Up Your “Level Up” with the Right Tools

Achievement unlocked! You’ve discovered the Shield of Testing, the Sword of Comment-based Help, and the Helm of Source Control and are armed to level-up your PowerShell team!

The concepts we’ve discussed in this guide have all carried a single theme: if you want to get better at PowerShell, it pays to be a team-player. By writing, organizing, commenting on, and testing your PowerShell with lower-XP team members in mind, you create a resilient PowerShell ecosystem and a team equipped to keep it functioning as expected.

All the tricks and tools in the world can’t do the people parts for you, but they can be a boon once you’ve embraced the PowerShell-people-first mindset.

I use PowerShell, and I work for Inedo. You can’t expect me not to talk about them! But really, they are very helpful for PowerShell. I’ve experimented with and tested the different ways our products help level-up PowerShell, and we asked our customers about it too.

I discussed earlier how Otter is a great way to create on-demand GUIs for your scripts through job templates, but there’s so much more. We reached out to our customers with a survey of how they’re using PowerShell with their Inedo tool(s), and here’s what they said:

How Inedo Users and Customers Level-up PowerShell with Inedo Products

With ProGet

With BuildMaster

  • Create PowerShell modules (and store scripts as assets)
  • Use build libraries to enforce dev standards and configuration values (segregating environment-specific values)
  • Verify that drop folders do not contain read-only or .tmp-type files
  • Automate AD group membership to keep app teams/approver groups up-to-date

With Otter

With the Inedo suite

  • Create a CI workflow with a private Git repository for multiple modules with BuildMaster, ProGet, and Otter
  • Deploy third-party PowerShell modules with ProGet and Otter

One of the best ways to enable PowerShell levelling up is with private module repositories, and this was one of the top-cited uses our customers discussed. I thought this warranted a “proof is in the pudding” walkthrough, so if you’re up for one Final Boss, check out the following chapter on how to publish PowerShell modules to ProGet.