I've been hard at work, and not just at my day job! It's been a while but I've finally gotten together and created a proper website for PS-Get including?.(drumroll please)?. a Gallery! Blatantly ripped off Borrowed from the NuGet Gallery Code, the PS-Get Gallery is a place to upload PS-Get modules for others to download. It also contains detailed installation instructions, but thanks to a new installer script, it's a pretty simple install! To install, just run this command from a PowerShell 3.0 or PowerShell 2.0 (with .NET 4.0 workaround, see below) window:

(new-object Net.WebClient).DownloadString("http://install.psget.org")|iex

And then you're all set! There's rudimentary support for automatically injecting the proper code into your Profile, but if you want to do it manually, all you need is Import-Module PS-Get.

So, what's new in PS-Get 0.6?

Import-Package Cmdlet

The Import-Package cmdlet is a one-step cmdlet that takes the name of a module as it's primary argument. It checks if that module is installed, and if not it installs it for you. Once the module is installed, it imports it in to the current environment. For example, consider the following code:

Import-Package PS-Json

If PS-Json is already installed, this is identical to Import-Module PS-Json. However, if PS-Json is not installed, it's install first. This means that if you sync your profile across multiple machines, all you need is some code to check for and install PS-Get and a bunch of Import-Package statements to get all your Modules installed and ready! In fact, the PS-Get install script (which you can download here) takes parameters that let you skip the entire wizard. So you could have code like the following in your profile and have PS-Get and all your favourite packages installed automatically!

if(@(Get-Module PS-Get).Count -eq 0) {
    Write-Host "This is the first time you've run this profile on this machine so we need to install PS-Get first..."
    (new-object Net.WebClient).DownloadString("http://install.psget.org")|iex
}
Import-Module PS-Get
Import-Package PS-MagicStuffThatILove

Package Source Management

New in PS-Get 0.6 is the ability to manage multiple package sources. Using Add-/Remove-/Get-PackageSource you can manage package sources at three scope levels: Machine (global to all users), User (global to all PowerShell sessions for the current user), Session (specific to just this PowerShell session). These sources will all be searched for packages when Install-Package and Update-Package are used to get new packages. The installer script automatically sets up the PS-Get Gallery as a machine-level source. You can still override the source by using the "-Source" parameter of most cmdlets.

Export-Module Cmdlet

PS-Get 0.6 adds a new cmdlet "Export-Module" which can be used to take an existing PowerShell Module and export it to a NuPkg file which can then be uploaded to the PS-Get Gallery. If the module directory contains a NuSpec file, we'll use that, otherwise will gather as much data as we can from the PSD1 manifest file (if there is one). Missing data can be filled in using arguments to the Export-Module cmdlet. Eventually, the plan is to make it easier to manage extra PS-Get-related metadata for Modules, either by augmenting the existing PSD1 manifests or by providing tools to manage NuSpec files for modules.

One thing this is missing right now is dependencies. If your module depends on another module, you'll need to create a NuSpec file for it. Removing this restriction is priority 1 for enhancing the Export-Module cmdlet.

Conclusion/The Future

I hope you'll try it out and start submitting packages to the gallery. It's ready to go, but I'll be perfectly honest that I'm doing this with no budget so I'm working on free/cheap hosting solutions and the site may go down.

If you want to help with the future of PS-Get, check out our GitHub page. Fork the code, file some issues on our tracker or just read the wiki!