PowerShell

PowerShell – Sub-Expressions

My thoughts on using sub-expressions to access object properties.

$serviceObj = Get-Service "wmi*"
Write-Output "Service Status $serviceObj.status"

Service Status System.ServiceProcess.ServiceController.status
Not really the output I was expecting.  This is where the sub-expression comes in handy!  I can use a sub-expression to extract the status property value and display without using another variable.
$serviceObj = Get-Service "wmi*"
Write-Output "Service Status $($serviceObj.status)"

Service Status Stopped
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Slack – Notification – PowerShell

I recently started using Slack more, specifically with custom notifications sent from outside Slack to my Slack channel.

There are many different ways to do this.  For this blog post, I will show you how I setup message sending with PowerShell.

PowerShell (Super Easy!)

  1. Use the PSSlack module to make things easy.
  2. Install this module on your server\workstation.
  3. Obtain your legacy token from here for your Slack instance.
  4. Setup your VS PowerShell project.  (Unreliable VS 2015 PS add-in)
  5. Write some easy code and have a tool like Jenkins run the program as needed!
    • Note, you will need to set the Token variable yourself.
    • You can select your message emoji from this list.
New-SlackMessageAttachment -Color $_PSSlackColorMap.green `
 -Title 'The Flask Build Deployment Passed' `
 -TitleLink https://www.devopsunleashed.com `
 -Text 'Great job!' `
 -Pretext 'Build Deployment Alert' `
 -AuthorName 'DevOpsUnleashed' `
 -AuthorIcon 'IMAGE_PATH_HERE' `
 -Fallback 'Your client is bad' |
New-SlackMessage -Channel '#build-results-flask' -Username "Build Notifier" `
 -IconEmoji :checkered_flag: |
Send-SlackMessage -Token $Token

You should get a nice message to your Slack channel!

Slack1

One of my main attributes of a good DevOps team is collaboration, the other being automation.  Slack is a great tool to assist in improving collaboration, and even allows for some cool automation!

slack-2014