Running PowerShell Core Commands Directly on Ansible Localhost

Previously I’ve written about Running PowerShell Core Commands in a Linux Target from Ansible . In this article, we’ll look at a similar topic, but instead the PowerShell commands will be executed directly on the local Ansible host, not on a Linux based remote target.

In my lab I’m running AWX in containers.

The cross-platform version of PowerShell is not installed by default in this deployment method of AWX, so we need to get it installed there first. Connect into the awx_task container and observe that it is based on Centos 8:

Instructions for installing PowerShell on Centos can be found here.

Upon completion we have a version of 6.2.3 installed:

The AWX inventory that we will target is the Demo Inventory which contains the localhost:

Our playbook for testing:

Note there are two ways to approach this, either with the command or shell modules.

1. With the command module we specify pwsh, followed by the command we wish to run
2. With the shell module the PowerShell command can be directly specified, however we need to supply the path to the shell we wish to use, i.e. /usr/bin/pwsh

Second note: the astute among you may have noticed the syntax to grab the User-Agent property from the returned JSON is not a simple dotted notation: apiOutput.headers[‘User-Agent’] . More info on how to get round a hypen in a name.

Either method can be used to achieve similar objectives, see below output of the above playbook (note the method documented here to return data from PowerShell to Ansible using JSON):