A General Question about build scripts and Powershell

[jontywigster]

Hi @fdcastel,

I see you opened discussions, great.

I have no idea if an off-topic question is OK. If not, please delete.

Decades (sadly) ago I helped companies deploy Windows clients. A weird circumstance meant changing field. I now only dabble occasionally at home.

You mentioned you have lots of PowerShell build scripts. What, roughly of course, do you do with them?

Again, if not OK, please delete.

Cheers!

[fdcastel]

In the world of software development, build scripts are the magical spells that compile, test, package, and deploy code.

And when it comes to casting those spells, Powershell is an absolute wizard. Not to throw shade, but it's miles ahead of certain, shall we say, vintage alternatives (which I’m totally not naming).

GitHub (and plenty of other cool alternatives like GitLab) come packed with CI (Continuous Integration) tools — basically, little automation wizards that jump into action whenever something in the repository (aka your source code) changes.

Powershell do the heavy lifting here: running scripts to compile and package our software. Where does it all go? Windows apps take a ride to Chocolatey, Linux containers sail off to Docker, Python scripts find a cozy home in Pip, and C# libraries and PowerShell scripts land in NuGet.

And then there’s the whole other universe of infrastructure — where scripts work their magic to spin up virtual machines, launch Kubernetes pods, or even build entire operating systems from scratch! 🚀

Long story short: the field is huge! There’s an endless amount to learn and explore. But through it all, Powershell is my trusty sidekick, making my life easier in all sorts of computing adventures.

[fdcastel]

Sadly, a lot of my scripts are private. but here's a public one I can show you as an example:

Firebird Docker build scripts

Lovingly handcrafted by yours truly, these scripts handle the heavy lifting of building and deploying Firebird Docker images. You can learn a lot studying them.

They use the amazing Invoke-Build — another masterpiece, polished and perfected over years by the brilliant @nightroman. I use it in every single one of my build scripts. No excuses.

[jontywigster]

Hi,

Thanks and wow! This is really fascinating.

When I started, I had half an idea to build something first for Hyper-V, but that could be extended to Proxmox. This isn't why I wanted to use PowerShell Core. Embarrassingly. I knew something of PowerShell was cross-platform but hadn't looked into what. I thought about other cross-platform stuff too but it seemed easier for me, personally, to start with PowerShell.

Something is odd though. My plan was to build some VMs but I read through your posts and there was a tinge of excitement at the possibilities.

Thanks again, amazing stuff :)