Tag: PowerShell

PowerShell Azure Functions to PowerApps “Hello World” (Part 1)

Posted on by Dan

Last time, I demoed local debugging of PowerShell Azure Functions. Kinda cool, but not very useful.

Do you know what else is kinda cool, but not very useful?

Hooking PowerShell Azure Functions into PowerApps.

This is part one of a probably-three-part series.

Part 1: Deploy your Function to Azure

Here we go!

  • The Azure Functions quickstart guide has you create a Function App from VS Code. I’m doing something slightly different, and deploying a function to an existing App, made in the Azure portal.
  • I’m using tweaked code from my previous post so that the HTTPTrigger function returns JSON rather than a string.
  • Remember to remove Wait-Debugger before you deploy!
  • It’s fun to watch the deployment commands scroll past. It looks like something called KuduScript is being used.
  • The Preview-ness shows in places. After you deploy a project from VS Code, you’re shown several options – but you can only pick one, because the dialog closes after a click.
  • And one of the options – Upload Settings – is potentially destructive. (It did warn me, and I did not heed. I had to delete and re-create my App.)
  • I invoked the function with Invoke-WebRequest, so that we can see the raw JSON. Note that – because of tweaks in the previous post – it’s also written to the log stream.
  • The Monitor page under your Function in the Azure portal shows similar information:
  • And you can even open a console in your function’s environment, right from the web interface. Apparently it’s running Windows 10 build 1607. Trippy!

Next time, we’ll create a PowerApps connector that talks to our pointless function – stay tuned!

PowerShell Azure Functions dependency on PowerShell Gallery

Posted on by Dan

I started writing a blog post today about hooking PowerShell Azure Functions into PowerApps.

But I couldn’t get even the simplest function to work – every query resulted in 500 (Internal Server Error).

Of course, I spent ages looking for a stupid mistake that I’d made. (And I found one: my code containted Wait-Debugger – this is still my biggest Azure Functions gotcha.)

Then I put two and two together. The PowerShell Gallery is down today, and this has broken a bunch of people’s CI/CD pipelines.

This is the error that I see in the Azure Functions portal:

Result: Failure
Exception: Fail to install function app dependencies.
Restarting the app may resolve the error.
Error: 'A connection attempt failed because the 
connected party did not properly respond after a period 
of time, or established connection failed because 
connected host has failed to respond A connection attempt
failed because the connected party did not properly respond 
after a period of time, or established connection failed 
because connected host has failed to respond'
Stack:
at Microsoft.Azure.Functions.PowerShellWorker.
DependencyManagement.DependencyManager.Initialize
(FunctionLoadRequest request) 
in C:\projects\azure-functions-powershell-worker\src\
DependencyManagement\DependencyManager.cs:line 179
at Microsoft.Azure.Functions.PowerShellWorker.
RequestProcessor.ProcessFunctionLoadRequest
(StreamingMessage request)
in C:\projects\azure-functions-powershell-worker\src\
RequestProcessor.cs:line 169

And I was able to fix my Function by commenting out the Az line in my local project’s requirements.psd1 and pushing the changes to Azure:

# This file enables modules to be automatically managed by the Functions service.
# Only the Azure Az module is supported in preview.
# See https://aka.ms/functionsmanageddependency for additional information.
#
@{
    #'Az' = '1.*'
}

Needless to say, PowerShell Azure Functions is in Public Preview, and it’s expected that things will sometimes not work.

But I expect dependencies on PowerShell Gallery in the wider ecosystem will get a lot of attention after today!

Demo: Debug PowerShell Azure Functions locally

Posted on by Dan

Over the past couple weeks I’ve started making a PowerApp called Boop for my wife.

But I’m a PowerShell guy at heart, and I’ve also been exploring preview support for PowerShell in Azure Functions, Microsoft’s serverless “run code on-demand” service.

I plan to stitch Azure Functions into Boop – and step one is to set up a local development environment for Azure Functions.

Here’s a demo of me debugging a local Azure Function, followed by some notes, and the code for my tweaked run.ps1.

All I’m doing is following Microsoft’s instructions, but hopefully seeing them in video form helps someone out there!

  • If you want to play along, first go to the Create your first PowerShell function in Azure (preview) quickstart guide, and run through Prerequisites, Install the Azure Function extension, and Create a function app project.
  • I’m using the default run.ps1 file that you get when creating a HttpTrigger Function, with a couple of tweaks:
    • Rather than just returning a string, I’ve created a hashtable and converted it to JSON. This gives us a head start when it comes to tying into PowerApps.
    • And I’m writing $body to the log stream so it’s easier to see what’s going on.
  • You can see that this method of debugging works great with PowerShell 7.0.0-preview.1.
  • But I could only get debugging with Visual Studio code to work with PowerShell 6.x, and even then, I couldn’t explore variables like $TriggerMetadata with the Debug panel – they just appear as flat objects.
  • The biggest gotcha so far is that it’s very easy to forget to remove Wait-Debugger from your script when you publish to Azure. This has already caught me out. Has anyone got a clever solution? Perhaps we can put Wait-Debugger in an if statement that only runs locally?

Here’s my version of run.ps1:

using namespace System.Net

# Input bindings are passed in via param block.
param($Request, $TriggerMetadata)

# Write to the Azure Functions log stream.
Write-Host "PowerShell HTTP trigger function processed a request."

# Interact with query parameters or the body of the request.
$name = $Request.Query.Name
if (-not $name) {
    $name = $Request.Body.Name
}

if ($name) {
    $status = [HttpStatusCode]::OK
    # Create a hashtable and convert to JSON
    $body = @{
        greeting = "Hello $name"
    } | ConvertTo-Json
}
else {
    $status = [HttpStatusCode]::BadRequest
    $body = "Please pass a name on the query string or in the request body."
}

Write-Information 'Write $body to log stream'
$body

Wait-Debugger

# Associate values to output bindings by calling 'Push-OutputBinding'.
Push-OutputBinding -Name Response -Value ([HttpResponseContext]@{
    StatusCode = $status
    Body = $body
})