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PowerShell: Advanced Profile
In my last post almost 6 months ago I spoke about PowerShell profiles, especially how I preferred a simple profile. If you are just doing some simple things that you need right away or aren’t administering an application like Azure, SharePoint or Office365 then you can suffice with the simple profile. Since I manage Office365 and the applications mentioned above I have morphed to a second profile that I now load to load everything that I need for those applications. The time entering my username and password for those accounts, saves on having to load a different PS1 or create a function to do it later. My thoughts about not creating the function is if I do it once the first time I can just continue working without stopping when I need to do something in those applications.
My previous profile looked like this:
set-location c:\Powershell
$a = (Get-Host).PrivateData
$a.ErrorForegroundColor = “green”
cls
Just your basic profile that sets my default location, and sets the color of the evil error message RED to easier to read GREEN on the blue background. Now for my work within all of the applications that I admin this is the profile I use:
set-location c:\PowerShell
$env:path += “;C:\PowerShell”
$host.ui.RawUI.WindowTitle = “Administrator – Sysadmin Mode”
$Shell = $Host.UI.RawUI
$a = (Get-Host).PrivateData
$a.ErrorForegroundColor = “green”
import-module MSOnline
Import-Module AzureAD
Import-Module AzureADPreview
Import-Module ‘C:\Program Files\SharePoint Online Management Shell\Microsoft.Online.SharePoint.PowerShell’
$cred = Get-Credential
Connect-MsolService -Credential $cred
Connect-AzureAD -Credential $cred
Connect-SPOService -Url https://company-admin.sharepoint.com -Credential $cred
So, that is a lot more involved, but I only interact with the loading of the profile once at the line: $cred = Get-Credential, which is where I enter my credentials for Office365. Obviously our AzureAD is connected to Office365 which includes our SharePoint too so I only need to enter my credentials once.
First a disclaimer: I close this profile shell when I leave the computer even though I lock the computer screen. This is best practice so that if anyone gains access to my workstation, they do not gain access to my Sysadmin account in PowerShell to do damage. We change our passwords on a regular basis to prevent access as is also best practice, but anything you can do to lower a hackers attack surface the better.
So, what does this all do? Well that is a pretty good question.
- I set the default location of my console as my PowerShell folder that contains all my scripts.
- I add the PowerShell folder to the system path
- Change the title of the shell to let me know I am running in Sysadmin mode.
- Set the system shell as the current console
- Set the error color to green
- Import all the Modules I need to make sure they do get loaded, including the SharePoint Module that is an MSI install
- Store my credentials for this session for use logging in
- Connect to all the services using the credentials I supplied. The SharePoint SPOService would need you to replace the word “company” with your company name.
I believe that this front end work saves me a lot of time when I have to do something in SharePoint or the SAAS client or AzureAD.
PowerShell: Simple Profile
I’ve read a lot of different posts, articles and listened to any different Power Users tell me how to set up my PS profile. What I have seen is that a lot, if not most people want to trick up their profile adding all kinds of cool things that just increase the load time of the PowerShell console. You can import modules when you need them, you can update help when you need it. You get my point.
I believe simple is better, including just enough to make it work and that’s not much at all. Lets see what I have in my PS profile:
set-location c:\Powershell
$a = (Get-Host).PrivateData
$a.ErrorForegroundColor = “green”
cls
Four lines, that’s it, but what do they do?
- set-location “Path” Just drops me in my PowerShell folder that all my scripts are in.
- $a = (Get-Host).PrivateData sets a variable so that I can change colors by accessing the ChildObject PrivateData to assign a different color to different things in the PS window.
- $a.ErrorForegroundColor = “green” uses the $a to add the ErrorForegroundColor so that I can assign it a value of green. You can do more with assigning cmdlets to variables but that isn’t the lesson here.
- cls is because I like a a clean workspace while I work.
That’s my whole profile. Nothing spectacular, or even ingenious. I just want to get working and I hate the RED error messages. Green looks so much better.
PowerShell: Get Computer Software and Version
Something that I have found useful in getting a hard copy of is a computers installed software, vendor and version. Today I’m just going to work with the local computer. In another post I will talk about the ability to get all software installed on a group of computers. In PowerShell there are a few ways to do what I am going to show you. The one I prefer is Get-CimInstance. I use this over Get-WMIObject becasue it gets me more information and Get-WMIObject is actually the older way from PS 2.0. It has really been replaced with Get-CimInstance. If you go to Introduction to CIM Cmdlets (MSDN Blog) you will find this quote:
“Getting/Enumerating instance of a class is the most commonly performed operation. We wanted the new Get-CimInstance Cmdlet to have better performance and even better user experience as compared to the old Get-WmiObject cmdlet. To achieve these goals we made the following design decisions:”
So, how do I write the code?
Get-ciminstance Win32_Product
or
Gcim Win32_Product (gcim is the alias for Get-Ciminstance)
That just spits out the information in the ugly format below:
I like my data so I can read it properly and with all the data I really want. Lets add a Piped command:
| Format-Table name, version, vendor
This gives you the results below:
Okay, so that’s nice, but how about in a CSV file that I can print or look at later? Cool, lets do it:
Gcim Win32_Product | Select-Object name, version, vendor | Export-Csv C:\software1.csv
I know, your saying wait you changed the second line from Format-Table to Select-Object and you would be correct. Why did I change it, well format-Table is for output to the console, not for something you are piping to Export-CSV. You have to Select the Objects you want to send to the CSV file to get proper data. Go ahead and try to use the Format-Table once to see you get nothing you can use in the CSV file. The output you get when you use the Select-Object is below. That’s how I would like it, how about you?
