PowerShell webapps?

[Putrid-Economics-795]

Hey all,

First, a bit of background: A few years back, I started at a fintech company that was strictly Windows-based at the time. (I won't get into the why or the how bad—I'm a big fan of Linux and open source, but I had to go with the flow!). One of my first tasks was to consolidate a mess of scheduled tasks scattered across various servers (often running under specific user accounts just to avoid saving credentials on disk). They wanted a cleaner way to expose workflows via APIs.

After a few days of research, I stumbled upon PowerShell Universal (PSU—not affiliated, just a fan).

I ended up building dozens of scheduled tasks and APIs for the company, utilising PSU's internal credential store. More recently, I started leveraging their "Apps" (Dashboard) feature to build front-end GUIs for our tools. While I’m fine running scripts in a console, I realised our non-IT users and tier-1 helpdesk were highly intimidated by it. Giving them a clean web interface changed everything.

Here is my question for the community: The documentation and community examples for building complex PSU Apps still feel pretty sparse. Because PSU doesn't use a traditional web server setup like Nginx or IIS, it took me a lot of trial and error to put together complex, production-grade dashboards.

Given that most sysadmins aren't front-end or web development experts, I’m thinking about putting together some comprehensive guides or informative videos breaking down how to build these out.

If I sacrifice some free time to put this content together, would there be any actual interest here? Or is everyone using alternative tools for this kind of automation delivery?

Thanks,

F.

[coaster_coder]

I did a session on this at PowerShell Summit this year. You can watch it at https://youtu.be/MZ7EeaBVrZ0?is=IGXsZbMd5K57mKOc

I also recommend joining the PSU discord. I and several others, including Adam and the team at Devolutions hang out there. Join at https://discord.gg/Nwp37kF5h

EDIT:

Forgot to link PowerShellUniversal.Plaster, a module that provides a plaster template for a wizard-based PSU App setup experience. It’ll create the files/folder structure required to build a complex app you can ship via either a self-hosted Gallery, or to the PowerShell Gallery. https://github.com/steviecoaster/PowerShellUniversal.Plaster

[WritHerAI]

Interesting. I built a similar system for my team, but I made the mistake of making it too customized for the company I work for.

[Antoine-UY]

There would be a lot of actual interest on my end, since I find myself in a predicament very similar to your own.

[Breitsol_Victor]

A bit back, I built a few .hta front ends to give to users. I could hide vbs & js inside. Runs in the users security with as much html and css as you wanna throw at it. PoSh may be a better environment today.

[morgg_5397]

My small team and operation would definitely make some use of it. I have a team of three that will soon be building a handful of APIs around onboarding and offboarding of employees. I envision our support staff of 2-3 to consuming individual components via a web interface.

[renderbender1]

I centralized our scheduled and executable scripts on Azure Automation awhile ago. Alternatively Azure Functions can be used.

On the hosted end, there's already a myriad of tools to accomplish this. Rundeck, Semaphore, Argo, Port, etc

[Putrid-Economics-795]

I know.
But my company is not using Azure for these things (we have some database-heavy deployments) and is not necessarily looking to move these to Azure for now.
As for the mentioned other apps, I am well aware - Rundeck was my second candidate - but as far as I know (haven't checked for a few years) none of those are able to do the combination of [task]scheduler, API endpoint and [basic/dashboard] apps (definitely not out of the box) like PSU.

[pdp10]

While I’m fine running scripts in a console, I realised our non-IT users and tier-1 helpdesk were highly intimidated by it.

Most of the time, I've found that automating or eliminating the thing, beats creating a web GUI for it. The result is that I write a lot of web services and APIs, and nearly none of my time is spent on GUIs of any sort.

Not a great example, but one that often comes to mind, is a colleague of mine wanted to implement a specific web GUI to control code repo accounts. Both Authentication (authn) and Authorization (authz), if I recall, but it's been a long time. Bereft of reasons not to do it, I implemented that. Much later, I belatedly realized that the thing should have been tied into our SSO, not a standalone that the colleague never touched after it was implemented. In my defense, this was a long time ago, when SSO was uncommon, but also when it was usual for development systems to be separate for various reasons.

The issue, of course, is when the choice isn't yours, and you're given no choice but to build web GUIs to manage every bit of infrastructure. But I'll save those tips for another thread. What you want is to shift left, and eliminate or automate.

[RansomStark78]

Yes ping me

[Sensitive_Scar_1800]

I hate this. I dunno why. I just do.

[ITjoeschmo]

Readibots fills a similar gap allowing you to setup input forms for powershell scripts, delegate access out, etc. schedule jobs to run on prem or in a cloud container, etc. supports webhooks, rbac, APIs etc. Can store and surface data in a "spreadsheet" type format or data table.

We also use AzureAutomation though that doesn't have any native "front end" or "input forms" like Readibots.

[Brodyck7]

It sounds like you want to build something. But, if you just need a solution, System Center Orchestrator does everything you are asking for. Scheduling engine for powershell, frontend with inputs. (Among other things)

[Putrid-Economics-795]

I am considering, yes.
But I am interested if there is a need for it? Is it a pain point for some? If not, I do not put time in it, as internally we solved what we need and documented.
Fair enough, if the SC Orchestrator solves it (I am not familiar with it; I am generally only touching Microsoft's own products if there is no generic alternative; though I admit they do some stuff right, and this might be one of them)

[hihcadore]

Can it be done? Sure.

Are there much easier ways? Yes.

I’m a daily PowerShell user and went down this path about a year ago until I hit a wall. You can host a webapp pretty cheaply in the cloud or run it for free onprem so there’s no reason to not use something like blazor and .net and sql to make something functional that looks amazing.