Automated testing of PowerShell

I have been expanding my library of PowerShell build scripts that I use for my work, and as such I want to ensure that they keep working as I expect them too. The obvious answer is automated tests but it was a case of how. I spent some time trying out PSUnit but to be honest I found it a bit hard, possibly just because I was unfamiliar with the framework. After a bit of digging here is the solution that I now use, and to make it harder I was using Visual Studio Express 2010.

Tools

• Visual Studio 2010 C# Express
• NUnit 2.5
• PowerShell 2 

Setup

I have a solution that contains two projects, one with my PowerShell scripts and the other with my tests just to keep things clean.

Scripts project

My PowerShell scripts are all part of a module so for my integration tests I install this module in the user directory. I am just using a build event to do this


rmdir %USERPROFILE%\Documents\WindowsPowerShell\modules\DevPipeline\ /s /q
mkdir %USERPROFILE%\Documents\WindowsPowerShell\modules\DevPipeline\
xcopy $(ProjectDir)\PowerShellModule %USERPROFILE%\Documents\windowspowershell\modules\DevPipeline

Tests project

To run tests in Visual Studio express I use the following work around after setting the project to be a Console Application rather than a library.



And then to run the command for my test I use the following class



Integration Tests


As I mentioned above I am treating these tests as integration tests and I import the module as part of the setup.

An example of the integration tests is below