PSCI is a build and deployment automation library that provides a simple Powershell DSC-like language allowing to express configuration as code. The general flow is presented on the image below:
There are several possibilities to run the deployment code - see Remoting configuration for diagrams:
- Powershell function run on local machine.
- Powershell function run on destination machine.
- DSC configuration run on destination machine.
- Double-hop deployments - e.g. WebDeploy + DSC.
PSCI provides following features:
- Simple DSL to describe Environments, Server Roles, Server Connections and Tokens (per-environment parameters).
- Written entirely in Powershell (requires Powershell 3.0, or 4.0 for DSC support).
- Provisioning mechanism that is based on Powershell Desired State Configuration resources or custom Powershell functions.
- Agentless architecture - deployment to remote environments pushes packages and execute code remotely using Powershell Remoting (WinRM) or Web Deploy.
- Reliable logging mechanism throughout the whole build and deployment process - every step is logged to console, text file and event log (optionally), errors include full stack trace / script lines information and friendly messages.
- Building and deploying various types of packages (MsDeploy - e.g. ASP.NET MVC or WPF, SQL, DbDeploy, Entity Framework Migrations, SSRS, SSAS, SSIS), easily extensible with new types of packages.
- Supports several methods of tokenizing configuration files (e.g. Web.config) - directly replace tokens in files (using regex), transform using XDT (Web.<env_name>.config) or use Web Deploy parameterization.
- Supports Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 / 7 and above (some available DSC resources like xWebsite have been fixed to work with pre-Server 2012).
Additionally, Objectivity.TeamcityMetarunners provides a set of TeamCity metarunners that make use of PSCI functions.
See Why PSCI.
- See Getting started.
- Checkout the code or get it from Powershell Gallery or nuget and use Powershell Tools for Visual Studio 2015 or PsISEProjectExplorer to explore.