Dbatools

This month’s T-SQL Tuesday is hosted by Rob Sewell and he’s posed the following question:

What are you going to automate today with PowerShell?

I’m cheating a little bit in that this is something I did a couple weeks ago, but it was immensely helpful. I’d been working on building out a new instance to migrate our test databases onto, but the developers had an urgent need to do some testing in isolation so they “borrowed” that new instance. But we had an additional requirement - the configuration needed to match production as closely as possible, more than our current test instance. Of course, I reached for PowerShell and dbatools.

While working on an enhancement to dbatools, I had a need to stash a local copy of a file downloaded from the internet, but in a safe place that I could reasonably expect to be safe from accidental deletion.

• User’s home directory? Maybe, but it’ll be clutter, the user might see it appear and fear that they’ve got malware. And likely deleted ina “cleanup” effort.

• Create my own directory somewhere on the file system? See above.

I’ve recently started contributing to the dbatools project and it’s all done through GitHub. Prior to this, I’d never used git and GitHub for anything more than an offsite repository for my own small repositories (I’ve used Subversion for over a decade) and I never totally understood how it worked in a large collaborative project until this came along.

I’m putting this together here for my own reference and to hopefully write it up in a way that helps things “click” for some people who need that extra nudge to get into “aha!” territory. A number of the examples I’ve seen elsewhere have mixed the command-line and GUI clients, but the more I use git GUIs, the less I like them for the basic workflow. You only need to know a handful of commands to be productive and for that, the command line beats the GUI in my opinion.

Earlier this week I was working on adding a new feature to Update-DbaTools and while looking at another cmdlet to check syntax/conventions, I noticed an ugly typo in some of the help for it. 100% perfect prose isn’t necessary in the comment-based help for PowerShell cmdlets, but seeing misspellings and such kind of bugs me. Fortunately this is something I can help fix since the module is on Github.

First I needed to find a spell-checker that works with Visual Studio Code to help me spot misspellings. This was slightly trickier than expected, as I use macOS at home and at least one of the first plugins I found was Windows-only. I finally settled on Code Spellchecker.