PowerShell Universal and Pester

PowerShell Universal
1

With PowerShell Universal, is there a way of starting a Dashboard on a custom port number like you could in Universal Dashboard 2.9? e.g. as below

$Server = Start-UDDashboard -Dashboard $Dashboard -Port 10000

This questions is really about how to create a Pester test for a custom control using the PowerShell Universal framework. The Pester test in the ud-custom-control-template is clearly written for UD and not PowerShell Universal.

I would like to be able to automatically stand up a temporary Dashboard, run my tests and bin it off.

Thanks
Edd

2

Hey Edd,

I’ve released a new blog post and template for Universal


To stand up a temporary server, you can use Start-PSUServer in the Universal module and pass in a listen address with your custom port.

Start-PSUServer -ListenAddress http://localhost:12345

The Start-PSUServer function is just a wrapper around start process.

function Start-PSUServer {
    param(
        [Parameter()]
        $ExecutablePath = "Universal.Server.exe",
        [Parameter()]
        $ListenAddress
    )

    $Command = Get-Command $ExecutablePath -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue
    if ($null -eq $Command)
    {
        throw 'Unable to locate the Universal Server executable. You can use Install-PSUServer to download the latest version. Use the -UpdatePathVariable parameter to add the installation directory the the PATH.'
    }

    if ($ListenAddress)
    {
        $Env:Kestrel__Endpoints__HTTP__Url = $ListenAddress
    }

    Start-Process -FilePath $ExecutablePath 
}

You can actually set any setting you’d like via environment variables so you could adjust the path to where PSU looks for the configuration files: https://docs.ironmansoftware.com/config/settings

Where ever you set the repository dir to, you could create your dashboard.ps1 and dashboards.ps1 to use your custom component. I would consider just using the UI to generate all the config files and then include them in your repo so you can just point the temporary PSU instance at them.

3

Fantastic!

I will have a read and thanks for the pointer on how to integrate this with Pester tests.

All the best

4

If you figure out a good way for testing with Pester, I’d be happy to merge that into the template repository because I think that will help anyone creating a customer component.