Leveraging NuGet as a central repository for PowerShell modules

We have been working a lot lately with PowerShell as part of our star product at Tellago Studios, “Moesion”. One of the main features we provide in Moesion is the ability to execute PowerShell commands remotely in a given server using a web mobile interface (You can read more in my previous post about Moesion).

One of the things we realized in all this time is that PowerShell lacks of a central repository where IT guys or we, the developers, can easily grab and reuse commands.  All the commands or modules are basically spread across multiple places or websites, like personal blogs, TechNet or CodePlex projects to name a few making the search of them very hard. You are usually limited to use your favorite search engine and copy what you find. In addition, there is not an easy way to reuse, extend or version these commands, which also limits any contribution that you could make to the community. 

My friend Jose wrote a great post the other day about the importance of reusing PowerShell modules, and what is the mechanism to reuse them. Jose, however, based his post in a custom implementation using a GIT repository for storing the modules.

We have NuGet in the .NET platform for sharing and reusing existing libraries or code, so why can’t just leverage it for reusing PowerShell modules as well ?. Some teams in Microsoft are using NuGet for distributing libraries and binaries so it would be a great thing for all of us if they also distribute the scripting interfaces in PowerShell using NuGet. This applies to the .NET OS community as well.

In fact, it looks like Andrew Nurse had the same idea and implemented a project for this in BitBucket, PsGet.

No Comments