I Made a PowerShell Module

So in my previous post (Looking up the command line history in Powershell) I wrote about my script that I use to get the command line history from PowerShell. And I mentioned that I wanted to make it into a module. Well, I did. And I’ve published it to the PowerShell Gallery. So if you want to try it out, you can install it by running

Install-Module -Name ExtendedHistory

in PowerShell. And if you want to see the source code, you can find it on GitHub

This is the first time I’ve tried to make a module for publishing and that was pretty educational.

I wish I’d read a little bit more about it before I started, because there are a lot of usefull little tricks that would have made it go faster. Like the fact that you can make a new module manifest file by running New-ModuleManifest and then just fill in the blanks. I didn’t know that, so I made the manifest file by hand. But it would have been faster to just run the command and then edit the file.

I also found out that there are pretty nice tools out there to make sure the scripts are up to best practises and don’t contain potentially harmfull code. The Powershell Gallery documentation says that for everything you think of uploading, you have to run:

• PowerShell Script Analyzer, which is in the PowerShell Gallery
• For modules, Test-ModuleManifest which is part of PowerShell
• For scripts, Test-ScriptFileInfo which comes with PowerShell Get

I had a couple of things in the code that PowerShell Script Analyzer wasn’t too happy about, that I corrected in the module before I published. The worst one being that I had used Invoke-Expression. I ended up replacing that with:

$ScriptBlock = [scriptblock]::Create($hist[$i])
write-host $ScriptBlock
invoke-command -ScriptBlock $ScriptBlock

Which is a bit more code, but it’s also a lot safer, since it doesn’t just run whatever is in the history file, but it creates a scriptblock from it, and then runs that.

Anyway, that’s my first published module, and I don’t plan on it being the last.