Introduction:

PowerShell profiles can be used to create a custom and consistent environment for your steps to run on in a Windows executor job. Profiles can include. variables, commands, functions and other elements that are needed.

Prerequisites:

Please ensure that you have a PowerShell profile available within your Windows job. This can be checked out from your repository, or generated dynamically with a script inside of the job itself.

Instructions:

1.  Create PowerShell profile .ps1 file

   • Write-Host "Loading custom PowerShell profile"
     $env:TEST_VAR = "Here is a sample string"

2. Copy profile to $PROFILE.AllUsersCurrentHost

   • Copy-Item .\MyPowershellProfile.ps1 $PROFILE.AllUsersCurrentHost

3. Set step shell to powershell.exe
   • The shell can be set at the step level or job level by including:

     shell: powershell.exe

Outcome:

Setting $PROFILE.AllUsersCurrentHost to the custom profile will execute it at the beginning of every step. This allows you to re-use anything defined within the profile, and reduces the amount of redundant code in your config.yml file.

Additional Notes:

Here is a full sample config.yml showing how to implement this:

version: 2.1

orbs:
  windows: circleci/windows@5.0.0

commands:
  create_profile:
    steps:
      - run:
          name: Set PowerShell profile
          command: |
            Copy-Item .\MyPowershellProfile.ps1 $PROFILE.AllUsersCurrentHost
jobs:
  build:
    machine:
      image: windows-server-2022-gui:current
    resource_class: windows.medium
    shell: powershell.exe
    steps:
      - checkout
      - create_profile
      - run:
          name: Test step with profile
          shell: powershell.exe
          command: |
            Write-Host "TEST_VAR is $env:TEST_VAR"
      - run:
          name: Test step with no profile
          shell: powershell.exe -NoProfile
          command: |
            Write-Host "TEST_VAR is $env:TEST_VAR"
workflows:
  my-workflow:
    jobs:
      - build

Additional Resources:

• PowerShell - Profiles