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This project aims to provide common psake and Invoke-Build tasks for building, testing, and publishing PowerShell modules.

Using these shared tasks reduces the boilerplate scaffolding needed in most PowerShell module projects and help enforce a consistent module structure. This consistency ultimately helps the community in building high-quality PowerShell modules.

If using psake as your task runner, version 4.8.0 or greater is required to make use of shared tasks distributed in separate modules. Currently, v4.8.0 of psake is in alpha. You can install the pre-release version with:

Install-Module -Name psake -RequiredVersion 4.8.0-alpha -Repository PSGallery -AllowPrerelease -Force

For Invoke-Build, see the how to dot source tasks using PowerShell aliases example.

This project is a work in progress and may change significantly before release based on feedback from the community. Please do not base critical processes on this project until it has been further refined.

This is in part based on the PlasterBuild project and MAY be merged into it. It is being kept separate for now so experimental features can be explored.

PowerShellBuild is a PowerShell module that provides helper functions to handle the common build, test, and release steps typically found in PowerShell module projects. These steps are exposed as a set of psake tasks found in psakeFile.ps1 in the root of the module, and as PowerShell aliases which you can dot source if using Invoke-Build. In psake v4.8.0, a feature was added to reference shared psake tasks distributed within PowerShell modules. This allows a set of tasks to be versioned, distributed, and called by other projects.

These primary tasks are the main tasks you'll typically call as part of PowerShell module development.

These secondary tasks are called as dependencies from the primary tasks but may also be called directly.

The psake and Invoke-Build tasks can be customized by overriding the following settings that are defined in the module. These settings govern if certain tasks are executed or set default paths used to build and test the module. You can override these in either psake or Invoke-Build to match your environment.

The example below is a psake file you might use in your PowerShell module. When psake executes this file, it will recognize that tasks are being referenced from a separate module and automatically load them. You can run these tasks just as if they were included directly in your task file.

Notice that the task file contained in MyModule only references the Build task supplied from PowerShellBuild. When executed, the dependent tasks Init, Clear, and StageFiles also contained in PowerShellBuild are executed as well.

properties {
    # These settings overwrite values supplied form the PowerShellBuild
    # module and govern how those tasks are executed
    $scriptAnalysisEnabled = $false
    $codeCoverageEnabled = $true
}

task default -depends Build

task Build -FromModule PowerShellBuild -Version '0.1.0'

The example below is an Invoke-Build task file that imports the PowerShellBuild module which contains the shared tasks and then dot sources the Invoke-Build task files that are referenced by the PowerShell alias PowerShellBuild.IB.Tasks. Additionally, certain settings that control how the build tasks operate are overwritten after the tasks have been imported.

Import-Module PowerShellBuild
. PowerShellBuild.IB.Tasks

# Overwrite build settings contained in PowerShellBuild
$scriptAnalysisEnabled = $true
$codeCoverageEnabled   = $false