How to use PowerShell in Azure DevOps Pipelines

3 min readJul 26, 2022

Use Powershell in Azure DevOps YAML pipelines.

Scripts act as the fuel for your DevOps pipelines and PowerShell plays a major role in automating your tasks. I recently worked on an Azure DevOps project where a lot of automation was scripted using PowerShell. There are many ways to run PowerShell tasks in your YAML pipelines and I will try to explain most of them

PowerShell is a task automation and configuration management program from Microsoft, consisting of a command-line shell and the associated scripting language

Inline scripts

You can run your PowerShell scripts as inline scripts in your YAML files, either as a single line or multi-line

- Powershell: "PowerShell single line"

- Powershell: |
      This is script line 1
        This is script line 2

Below are the various method to run your inline PowerShell scripts

Method 1: Using powershell.exe

powershell.exe is the executable name of the legacy Windows PowerShell edition (v5.1-), built on the Windows-only .NET Framework (v4.8-) It doesn't support cross-platform execution and only on windows agents.

stages:
  - stage: Initialize
    displayName: 'Initialize Stage'
    pool: "windows-server-pool"
    jobs:
    - job: Install
      displayName: 'Install Dependencies (PowerShell)'  
      steps:
      - script: |
         @"%SystemRoot%\System32\WindowsPowerShell\v1.0\powershell.exe" -NoProfile -InputFormat None -ExecutionPolicy Bypass -Command "Install-PackageProvider NuGet -Scope CurrentUser -Force"
        displayName: 'Powershell Install NuGet'
      - script: |
            @"%SystemRoot%\System32\WindowsPowerShell\v1.0\powershell.exe" -NoProfile -InputFormat None -ExecutionPolicy Bypass -Command "Install-Module -Name SqlServer -AllowClobber -Scope CurrentUser -Force"
        displayName: 'Powershell Install SqlServer Module'

Method 2: Using pwsh.exe

pwsh[.exe] is the executable file name of PowerShell [Core] (v6+), the cross-platform edition of PowerShell built on .NET Core / .NET 5+

- pwsh: './SmokeTest.ps1 -url $(WebAppDeploy.AppServiceApplicationUrl)'
  displayName: 'Run Smoke Test'
  workingDirectory: '$(Pipeline.Workspace)/DeployScripts'
  failOnStderr: true

pwsh runs PowerShell Core, which must be installed on the Linux specific agent or container and to install pwsh in your Linux agents, run

sudo apt-get install -y PowerShell
pwsh --version

Method 3: — PowerShell task

- powershell: |
     Install-Module -Name Az -AllowClobber -Scope CurrentUser -Force
     displayName: 'Install Azure Powershell'

Method 4: PowerShell@2 Task

This is the shortcut of `- powershell:` and ` — pwsh` and depending on the options chosen, the pipeline agent will either be on Windows or Linux.

- task: PowerShell@2
  displayName: 'Run Smoke Test'
  inputs:
    filePath: '$(Pipeline.Workspace)/DeployScripts/SmokeTest.ps1'
    arguments: '-url $(WebAppDeploy.AppServiceApplicationUrl)'
    failOnStderr: true
    pwsh: true

The advantage of using inline code is keeping all functionality in a single place, making it easier to see everything that’s going on. But, this approach can get complicated if you have a large pipeline.

Scripts

You can run .ps1 scripts also in your YAML pipelines. Save the .ps1 files inside a folder under $(System.DefaultWorkingDirectory) and set targetType to filePath for execution. Then specify the path of the script to run via the filePath attribute.

- task: PowerShell@2
  retryCountOnTaskFailure: 2
  inputs:
    targetType: 'filePath'
    filePath: $(System.DefaultWorkingDirectory)/Scripts/health.ps1
    arguments: > # Use this to avoid newline characters in a  multiline string
      -uri "https://myapp.azurewebsites.net/health"
  displayName: 'Health check'

By default, Azure DevOps will checkout all code in the source repo. Checking out the code will download script files from the repo onto the pipeline agent, making them available for execution. The exception here is the `- deployment:` job which you will have to force checkout using — checkout: self

Conclusion

PowerShell is so handy for the DevOps engineers, which works on both Windows and Linux agents. Azure DevOps supports both PowerShell inline and scripts inside your pipelines, which can be chosen based on the complexity of your code.