Getting Started

Before we can deploy a PowerShell Private Gallery, we need to nail down a few prerequisites.

Prerequisites

  1. An Azure account
  2. A Visual Studio Team Services account
  3. A fork of this repository

Getting an Azure Account

If you don't already have a Microsoft Azure account, you can sign up for one here. This option will sign you up for an Azure Account with a $200 credit - that credit expires at the end of your first month though, so be aware of this!

If you're a student, you may want to use your DreamSpark account with Azure.

If you're an MSDN subscriber, you definitely want to hook up your MSDN account to Azure - you get up to $150 per month in credits!

Setting up Visual Studio Team Services

The first thing to do is to sign up. Once you're signed up, you'll need to create a team project - for the rest of the Walkthrough we're going to assume that you've called the project 'PSPrivateGallery'. The URL for this should look something like https://youraccountname.visualstudio.com/PSPrivateGallery.

Forking this Repository

To fork this repository, first go to the repository's page on Github. Then click the Fork button in the top right corner. You should now have a fork of the repository in your own account.

PowerShell Modules

You'll need the AzureRM PowerShell modules installed to create your VSTS Service Principal. If you have PowerShell v5, this is relatively straightforward:

Find-Module AzureRM | Install-Module -Force -Scope CurrentUser

Note: If you'd like to install the module for everyone on the computer, you can drop -Scope CurentUser - however, you'll need to run the command with administrator rights.

Create a Visual Studio Team Services Service Principal Account

In order to connect our Azure account to VSTS, we'll need to generate a Service Principal Account. The easiest way is to follow the directions here from the MSDN Blog. All we've done here is to pull the script into our script folder (Add-AzureServicePrincipal.ps1).

The short version, if you just want to get started, is to run that script on your local machine. You'll need to know your Azure Subscription name and specify a password for the Service Principal.

For example (assuming you've opened a powershell prompt at the root of your local clone of this repository:

Push-Location .\Scripts
.\Add-AzureServicePrincipal.ps1 -subscriptionName 'MySubName' -Password 'SomeS35ure Password, hahahah! :D'
Pop-Location

You should get output like the block below; Save it in a notepad! You're going to need it for Step Two!

***************************************************************************
Connection Name: MySubName(SPN)
Subscription Id: dbcdf31c-a2fb-4e27-a0ec-0af48fdb03ac
Subscription Name: MySubName
Service Principal Id: 1670693b-0c9e-4782-ac17-4e2c27064995
Service Principal key: <Password that you typed in>
Tenant Id: 8494debb-26c9-47c3-85bf-35ee23d3ae01
***************************************************************************

Save that output! We're going to use it in

Finally!

That's it, you've got all the prerequisites for this walkthrough now. Next up: adding your fork to VSTS.