Add Executable drop-down box inside the PowerShell task

[Bruno Rosa]

Since v1.1.13 of the plugin got released a new PowerShell requirement is added to Bamboo jobs when we create or update an existing PowerShell task. The problem is that the requirement is very specific: it asks for a capability of type PowerShell named PowerShell. However Bamboo allows users to create PowerShell capabilities and label them with the most varied names. I'd suggest adding an Executable drop-down box inside the PowerShell task (similar to the Bamboo's built-in Maven task, Ant task and etc) to allow users to select from existing PowerShell capabilities. This way users that already have PowerShell tasks across all their agents, but under a different name/label, don't have to go through a rename process. This could be a real headache for large Bamboo instances with thousands of remote agents.

[Sergey Podobry]

Hi Bruno,

The idea was to automatically detect PowerShell capabilities of build agents (including PowerShell bitness) without any extra actions from a user. However it will require server restart.

Didn't automatic detection work on your setup?

[Bruno Rosa]

Hi Sergey,

Thanks for the quick response. Yes, it does automatically detect the capability, but the problem is it only works if you're using the PowerShell capability type. I later on figured out that this specific type of capability was introduced by the plugin - it's not a native Bamboo capability. When users first set up their agents they didn't have this type of capability available so they had to use the Command capability instead and call it PowerShell.

This became a problem now because the task adds a very specific requirement to the job - agents must be using the PowerShell capability type introduced by the plugin. Since none of the agents are, none of them are capable of building the job until we manually remove the PowerShell (Command) capability in each one of them and add a PowerShell (PowerShell) capability - not sure if that makes sense.

The idea of having a drop-down box was to somehow make it easier for users to select another capability instead of being forced to use the one introduced by the plugin. As you might now, this wasn't a problem in previous versions because we didn't have any requirements inside the job, and users were not prepared/didn't know about this change, so plans just stopped getting queued/running and we had to investigate what was going on.

Thanks!