Windows 10 is nearly upon and one of the features I am looking forward to is PowerShell 5. More specifically I am looking forward to the new PowerShellGet module.
This is effectively apt-get or yum for Windows and the implications for systems administrators are significant. I just finished a quick test drive of the functionality in the Windows 10 Technical preview and wanted to share my findings.
Let’s start by finding the module. We assume it has the word ‘get’ in it so we can do:
Get-Module *Get* –ListAvailable
We find a module called ‘PowerShellGet’. Let’s see what commands it offers using Get-Command
Get-Command –Module PowerShellGet
Get-PSRepository sounds interesting as I know the understand the intention is to allow you to connect to both official repos to download software or host your own internal corporate one. Let’s see what we have:
Get-PSRepository
Just one repository for now. Let’s see what’s in it using a command we discovered earlier
Find-Module
Lots of goodies here! So let’s say we want to install Chrome, Firefox and 7zip on this machine. How might we do that?
Install-Module xchrome, xfirefox, x7zip
That’s it, those applications are now installed. Imagine now having your own custom repo for all the apps your users use, precustomized with whatever you need.
While it’s true similar functionality already exists with third party modules such as Chocolatey, it can’t be understated how significant it is that this functionality is now baked into Windows itself.
I strongly suspect that PowerShell 5 will be backported to earlier operating systems so this functionality should soon be available for most of your fleet.
Anyone can now download and install applications easily… or you can easily push them out using PowerShell remoting. This opens up a world of new possibilities!
