Executing commands and scripts on a VM within the Azure portal

At times you may need to run a script or a command to retrieve resources or create new resources. Rather than having to SSH or RDP into your server, you can easily run these commands or scripts right from the Azure Portal.

Pre-requisites;
1) An Azure account
2) A Linux VM, Windows VM, or preferably both.
3) Knowledge of Bash and PowerShell (I will explain the cmdlets and shell scripts that I'm running)

First thing you want to do is go to your Resource Group within Azure and head over to your VMs.

(For the Linux portion) Click on your Linux and in the left pane scroll down to "Run command".

Once you click on "Run command", you'll see two options. RunShellScript and ifconfig. Choose RunShellScript.

Once you're there, you can run whatever script or bash line you'd like.

Similarly, we can do the same on a Windows machine. If you set up a Windows Server, head over to your Windows Server and find the "Run command" option in the same place as the Linux VM.

We'll see a few more options here then we saw in the Linux VM. Let's choose "RunPowerShellScript".

This is quite useful if you need to run a script or a line of code against one machine to ensure something exists or you know you need to install something one time. I wouldn't recommend using this for something like running a script on 5 different machines. This is more for one-off checks/installs.

Comments

Run PowerShell code with Ansible on a Windows Host

Ansible is one of the Configuration Manager kings in the game. With it's easy-to-understand syntax and even easier to use modules, Ansible is certainly a go-to when you're picking what Configuration Management you want to use for your organization. Your question may be "but Ansible is typically on Linux and what happens when I'm in a Windows environment?". Luckily I'm here to tell you that Ansible will still work! I was pleasantly surprised with how easy it is to use Ansible on Windows with a little WinRM magic. Let's get started.

Pre-requisites for this post:
1) WinRM set up to connect to your Windows host from Ansible
2) Ansible set up for Windows Remote Management
3) SSH access to the Ansible host
4) Proper firewall rules to allow WinRM (port 5985) access from your Ansible host to your Windows host
5) Hosts file set up in Ansible that has your IP or hostname of your Windows Server.
6) At least one Linux host running Ansible and one Windows Server host …

Running PowerShell commands in a Dockerfile

As Docker continues to grow we are starting to see the containerization engine more and more on Windows. With the need for containers on Windows, we also need the same automation we get in Linux with Dockerfiles. Today we're going to create a Dockerfile that runs PowerShell cmdlets.
Prerequisites; 1. Docker for Windows
2. A code editor (VSCode preferred)

Let's go ahead and get our Dockerfile set up. Below is the Dockerfile I used for this post.

from mcr.microsoft.com/windows/servercore:1903 MAINTAINER Michael Levan RUN powershell -Command Install-WindowsFeature -Name Web-Server RUN powershell -Command New-Item -Type File -Path C:\ -Name config
As you can see from the above, this is a tiny Dockerfile. What this will do is install the IIS Windows

Feature and create a new file in C:\ called "config".
You should see something very similar to the below screenshot;

Next let's create a running container out of our image. First we'll need to run docker container ls to

get o…

DevOps tooling in the Microsoft realm

When I really started to dive into automation and practicing DevOps with specific tooling, there were a few key players. At the time Microsoft was not one of them. They were just starting to embrace the open source world, including the art and practice of DevOps. Since then Microsoft has went all in and the tech giant has made some incredible tooling. Recently I switched to a Microsoft-heavy environment and I love it. I went from AWS/Python/Ansible/Jenkins to Azure/PowerShell/ARM/Azure DevOps. My first programming language was PowerShell so being back in the saddle allowed me to do a full circle between all of the different types of tooling in both worlds. Today I want to share some of that tooling with you.

The first thing I want to talk about is ARM. What is ARM? ARM is a configuration management tool that allows you to perform software-defined-infrastructure. Much like Ansible and Terraform, ARM allows you to define what you want your environment to look like at scale. With ARM, yo…

The Life Of An Engineer

Search This Blog