PowerShell

Recently I’ve been working on several PowerShell scripts that require credentials to access REST APIs. In this blog post, I will showcase two approaches for storing credentials securely for use in PowerShell scripts. Encrypted Password File 🔒 The encrypted password file leverages the Windows Data Protection API (DPAPI) to encrypt the password as a System.Security.SecureString: $Credentials = Get-Credential $Credentials.Password System.Security.SecureString $Credentials.Password | ConvertFrom-SecureString 01000000d08c9ddf0115d1118c7a00c04fc297eb01000000f5ab85d7ee9da048ae4ae797ee7eaf0a000000000200000000001066000000010000200000008c4a03d2f0731e0e7661d695fda8b441eaff31e75724931f31374a0c8292b636000000000e800000000200002000000028da885828bd627480178382ce9a1b477819e7703546ce41819d37f4e63d33ba20000000ab2c4401635ec24db9f20071e18dea0b79ce16ba38b5503ec9937b7fbc849dcf40000000155053a793c210998ef7317b0161e7344c2174b904b527c0cf24e7bbf2243b99e936df3ab67bc9e285a1be33aed37c7604fb07f5d0c44ceb7d6334ca30b0a610 By default DPAPI uses the current user context to generate an encryption key. This encryption key is then used to encrypt the PSCredential.Password property as a System.Security.SecureString (as shown above). It is possible to provide your own encryption key, but I won’t be covering that in this post. If you want to read more on this, check out Travis Gan’s blog 1. ...

Hi there! 👋 Recently I discovered Git Hooks. Git Hooks provide a way of running custom scripts when a certain git action occurs. In this post, I want to share a pre-commit Git Hook I’ve written to lint PowerShell code using the PSScriptAnalyzer module. What is a Linter? 🕵️‍♂️ A linter analyses code to identify common errors, bugs and stylistic issues. Their aim is to improve code quality. Linters perform static analysis meaning they check code without executing it. Some well known linters for other languages include ESLint and Pylint. ...