Comfortably Save a Pester Test

I’ve spent some time with Pester this week. While exploring the OutputFile parameter, it quickly became clear that the best I seemed to be able to output was some form of XML, and honestly, that wasn’t good enough for me in my moment of discovery. While I intend to make myself a Pester expert in the coming year (2018), there’s somethings I don’t know 100% yet, and so I understand it’s possible that I sound like an idiot, as I may not know about x in regard to Pester.

While working with Invoke-Pester, I came across the -PassThru parameter. Its purpose in life, in relation to the Invoke-Pester command, is to create a PSCustomObject. Now that’s, something I can work with. The idea here is to invoke Pester against an AWS instance, export my object (to an XML standard I can deal with [thank you Export-Clixml]), and write it to S3. Then, I can download the file to a computer that’s not my newly configured AWS instance, and check for what tests passed and failed. This, without the need to RDP (Remote Desktop), to the instance, and visually and manually check to see what did and didn’t work from there. We’re getting closer and closer to RDP being a security incident.

My example is not going to include an actual Pester run, so instead we’ll jump directly to the Invoke-Pester command and what we’ll do after that command has executed. This first example is a fairly standard way of invoking Pester (with parameters) and creating an output file. Again, this isn’t the output I’m after.

PS > Invoke-Pester -Script @{Path = 'C:\WkDir\HostAcceptance.Tests.ps1'; Parameters = @{Project = 'trailking'; Environment = 'tst'}} -OutputFile 'C:\WkDir\PesterOutputXml.xml'

Instead we’re going to include some other parameters, to include PassThru, Show, and OutVariable. PassThru will provide us an object that contains all of the Pester results, Show with the None value will hide the Pester test results, and OutVariable will get that object (that again, contains all of the Pester results) into the PesterResults variable.

PS > Invoke-Pester -Script @{Path = 'C:\WkDir\HostAcceptance.Tests.ps1'; Parameters = @{Project = 'trailking'; Environment = 'tst'}} -PassThru -Show None -OutVariable PesterResults

I was mainly okay with the above command; however, it was still writing my object to the host program, and I wanted nothing to be displayed, at all. It’s too bad that option isn’t in there by default, but I’m okay with improvisation. Again, I know PowerShell better than Pester, so there is the possibility I just don’t know enough at the immediate moment to not have done this a potentially better way. Anyway, the below example removes all the output to the host, but still stuffs my results into the PesterResults variable.

PS > [System.Void](Invoke-Pester -Script @{Path = 'C:\WkDir\HostAcceptance.Tests.ps1'; Parameters = @{Project = 'trailking'; Environment = 'tst'}} -PassThru -Show None -OutVariable PesterResults)

Okay, now what? Everything I need and more is now in the $PesterResults variable. Next, we’ll export it into an XML format I (as in Import-Clixml), can deal with.

PS > $PesterResults | Export-Clixml -Path 'C:\WkDir\PesterExport.xml'

Now that it’s in a usable format, I’m going to read it back in. You can go ahead and pretend that I’ve moved my exported XML file from the computer on which it was created, and now I’m about to read it in on a different computer. This visualization is as though it was uploaded to AWS S3, and downloaded from S3 on a different device. We’ll say it’s on my Desktop.

$PesterResults = Import-Clixml -Path 'C:\Users\tommymaynard\Desktop\PesterStuff\PesterExport.xml'
Foreach ($Result in $PesterResults.TestResult) {
    [System.Array]$Object += [PSCustomObject]@{
        Describe = $Result.Describe.TrimEnd(':')
        Context = $Result.Context.TrimEnd(':')
        It = $Result.Name.TrimEnd(':')
        Should = $Result.Result
        Time = $Result.Time
    }
} 

$Object
# $Object | Format-Table -Autosize
# $Object | Export-Csv -Path 'C:\Users\tommymaynard\Desktop\PesterStuff\PesterExport.xml' -NoTypeInformation

In the above example, we do a few things. We import the file we created out in AWS into a variable on my local computer, and then begin to iterate through its contents. For each entry, we add other object to my Object variable. Each object will contain a Describe, Context, It, Should, and Time property which is all obtained from the TestResult property of my PesterResults variable.

The last three lines are a few ways to handle the output (2 and 3 are commented out): (1) display it in the host, (2) display it in the host in an easier to read format, and (3) write the objects to CSV. Neat, right. As I continue to better learn Pester… I might just be back here. I can’t be 100% that this is the best way to save off and deal with the results of the Pester tests, but we’ll see!

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