ruby-pwsh

The PowerShell gem.

This gem enables you to execute PowerShell from within ruby without having to instantiate and tear down a PowerShell process for each command called. It supports Windows PowerShell as well as PowerShell Core (and, soon, just PowerShell) - if you're running *PowerShell v3+, this gem supports you.

The Manager class enables you to execute and interoperate with PowerShell from within ruby, leveraging the strengths of both languages as needed.

Installation

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'ruby-pwsh'

And then execute:

bundle install

Or install it yourself as:

gem install ruby-pwsh

Usage

Instantiating the manager can be done using some defaults:

# Instantiate the manager for Windows PowerShell, using the default path and arguments
# Note that this takes a few seconds to instantiate.
posh = Pwsh::Manager.instance(Pwsh::Manager.powershell_path, Pwsh::Manager.powershell_args)
# If you try to create another manager with the same arguments it will reuse the existing one.
ps = Pwsh::Manager.instance(Pwsh::Manager.powershell_path, Pwsh::Manager.powershell_args)
# Note that this time the return is very fast.
# We can also use the defaults for PowerShell Core, though these only work if PowerShell is
# installed to the default paths - if it is installed anywhere else, you'll need to specify
# the full path to the pwsh executable.
pwsh = Pwsh::Manager.instance(Pwsh::Manager.pwsh_path, Pwsh::Manager.pwsh_args)

Execution can be done with relatively little additional work - pass the command string you want executed:

# Instantiate the Manager:
posh = Pwsh::Manager.instance(Pwsh::Manager.powershell_path, Pwsh::Manager.powershell_args)
# Pretty print the output of `$PSVersionTable` to validate the version of PowerShell running
# Note that the output is a hash with a few different keys, including stdout.
pp(posh.execute('$PSVersionTable'))
# Lets reduce the noise a little and retrieve just the version number:
# Note: We cast to a string because PSVersion is actually a Version object.
pp(posh.execute('[String]$PSVersionTable.PSVersion'))
# We could store this output to a ruby variable if we wanted, for further use:
ps_version = posh.execute('[String]$PSVersionTable.PSVersion')[:stdout].strip
pp("The PowerShell version of the currently running Manager is #{ps_version}")

Reference

You can find the full reference documentation online, here.

Supported Operating Systems

The following platforms are supported:

Windows
CentOS
Debian
Fedora
OSX
RedHat
Ubuntu
AlmaLinux

Limitations

When PowerShell Script Block Logging is enabled, data marked as sensitive in your manifest may appear in these logs as plain text. It is highly recommended, by both Puppet and Microsoft, that you also enable Protected Event Logging alongside this to encrypt the logs to protect this information.

License

This codebase is licensed under Apache 2.0. However, the open source dependencies included in this codebase might be subject to other software licenses such as AGPL, GPL2.0, and MIT.