Tips and tricks for when we don't have local admin rights

First presented at PowerShell Conference Europe 2022

When we are on Windows we don't need to install anything to get it started. Just search for ISE in the Start menu to show find Windows PowerShell ISE. ISE stands for Integrated Scripting Environment

ISE is perfectly enough!

The $profile file will get executed every time when we start PowerShell, so this is where we can constomize our experience. (But it does not exists by default)

Write-Host $profile

Test-Path $profile

New-Item $profile -ItemType File

New-Item $profile -ItemType File -Force

Let's try it!

Execution policy in PowerShell is like something eveyone runs into and turns off...

Get-ExecutionPolicy

Set-ExecutionPolicy -ExecutionPolicy RemoteSigned

# Try scoping it to us

Set-ExecutionPolicy -ExecutionPolicy RemoteSigned -Scope CurrentUser

# if RemoteSigned does not work, just use Bypass

Set-ExecutionPolicy -ExecutionPolicy Bypass -Scope CurrentUser

As others have already said it, color red is bad, so let's use something nicer

$host.PrivateData.ErrorForegroundColor = 'Green'

# and try it
1/0

Also, save this into our profile, because this is not a persistent setting.

The PowerShell Gallery is from where we can get the goodies, like QR code generator

Find-Module QRCodeGenerator
Find-Module QR*

Install-Module QRCodeGenerator

Install-Module QRCodeGenerator -Scope CurrentUser

PowerShell has the most awesome extensible help system

Get-Help

But sadly by default it comes empty, and we need to download the help with admin rights so here we need to ask help from our - hopefully - friendly neighbourhood IT admin, or help desk person to run this command as a local admin on our machine

Update-Help -Force -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue

So we can use Get-Help without any errors.

Get-Help

Get-Member

Get-Command

Get-Command Get-*

Get-Command Set-*

Get-Command *-Computer

$ProgressPreference = 'SilentlyContinue'
$PSDefaultParameterValues["Install-Module:Scope"] = "CurrentUser"

Influenced by Mike F Robbins

http://mikefrobbins.com

PowerShell 101: The No-Nonsense Beginner’s Guide to PowerShell

And also by Chrissy LeMaire's Tweet