Team City PowerShell and Parameters

There are times when its really annoying, you get technology x up and running on your development machine and then try to integrate it into the wider enterprise system and fall at what is really the first hurdle, this has happened to me again, hence this post about what on the surface is a simple task, but has taken me some days to sort out.

The task:
Getting a PowerShell script to run within a Team City build where the PowerShell script needs a couple of parameters handed in.  told you it was simple! lets have a quick look at the script.

param(
    [parameter(Mandatory=$true)] [string]$arg1,
    [parameter(Mandatory=$true)] [string]$arg2,
    [parameter(Mandatory=$false)] [int]$arg3=2,
    [parameter(Mandatory=$false)] [int]$arg4=3
)

Function ParameterTest
{
    $total = $arg3+$arg4
    
    Write-Host $arg1
    Write-Host $arg2
    Write-Host $total
}

ParameterTest

Nothing scary, the important bit is the parameters at the top, these must be the first executable lines of the script and when the script is called the first two are mandatory so its off to team city to setup the build step.

For me the thing to remember is to set the script execution mode to file, this shows the additional script arguments block where we can add the script arguments and there values, note we can use the team city environment variables here as usual.

This post is mainly for the future me who can’t get the script to run in Team City, remember that power shell must have execution permissions set.