N.B. Peter has changed the structure of the module (as he has every right to do, and I'm not complaining) - what this means is that this blog post is pretty useless other than as an exercise in poking at things. Maybe I'll figure it out, but in the meantime, assume that this technique won't work. 

I spend quite some time fiddling with various powershell implementations on my Tridion image. Whenever there's a place where I do experimental things like this, I run the risk that I'm going to break something so, at the very least, I usually do a quick "git init" in the directory, add the files and commit them. Then I have the benefit of version diffs and rollbacks if I need them. The next step comes when I realise that it's something I'm going to work on over a longer time, and that I really would prefer not to lose. At this point, I usually go on to my linux server and init a bare git, and then push from whereever I'm working.

Today I reached this second phase with the WindowsPowerShell directory of the Administrator account on my Tridion image. (It's about time, because I'm busy preparing a talk for the Tridion Developer summit in a couple of weeks, and well, losing my scripts would put a kink in my plans, to say the least.

In any case, I'd realised that I was running quite an old version of Peter Kjaer's Tridion-CoreService module. This module is the basis of pretty much any effort to use the Tridion core service from the powershell, and as this is the subject of my upcoming talk, I figured I should at least be doing my demos on the current version.

If you go to the github page for the module, you'll see that Peter's provided installation scripts which will help you to get up and running, but of course, if you have git installed, it makes just as much sense to clone the module directly. The only problem I had was that Modules are normally located in the Modules directory under the WindowsPowerShell directory. (You can add other locations to env:PSModulePath, but for what I wanted, that wasn't ideal.)

Fortunately, GIT is widely used for projects that make use of other projects, and there is very good support built in, by way of git-submodule. As my main git repository for the powershell stuff is directly in the WindowsPowerShell directory, all I needed to do was add Peter's module as a submodule with the right path.

In fact I just clicked on the menu option in Tortoise Git, but the basic command looks something like this:

git submodule add --name Modules/Tridion-CoreService git@github.com:pkjaer/tridion-powershell-modules.git Modules\Tridion-CoreService

With this in place, git understands that the Tridion-CoreService code belongs to Peter's module, and if he releases a new version, I can just pull. And of course, my own changes go in my own repository. Adding a submodule adds a .gitmodules file in your repository, so if I ever clone my WindowsPowerShell repository into another server, the location of Peter's repository can be retrieved, and the files pulled from there.

One word of warning. This is not the official release process for the Tridion-CoreService module. That is described here. As the module is pretty much a one-man affair, it's not unreasonable that there's only the master branch, so pulling from it is at your own risk. Personally I'm happy with the small risk, as it helps me to keep my development system a bit tidier - and heck - if it breaks, we'll fix it!

.