This weeks cool tool is another VMware fling called WebCommander. Well it was a fling that has now become open source. More info here
I will try to make a short series of posts on this. First up is install.
WebCommander is basically a web portal for your Powershell scripts..or as they describe it..like an App store. It makes consuming PowerShell scripts easier for the end user who may not be familiar with running scripts.
Some prereqs for WebCommander are IIS8 (so windows 2012), PowerShell v4, PowerCli 5.5 & PHP 5.3. Download PowerCli from the VMware website and install. PowerCli requires .Net 3.5 which is not available natively in 2012 so you will need the install media for 2012. I posted this in a seperate post but here but basically all you need to do is mount the 2012 ISO and run the following command
dism /online /enable-feature /featurename:NetFX3 /all /Source:d:\sources\sxs /LimitAccess
Once .Net 3.5 is installed you should be able to complete the Powercli install. The latest setup script for Webcommander will install the components for you but if like me you are running it in a lab with limited web connectivity then installing them manually is the way to go. To install PHP go here http://php.iis.net . This will install the Microsoft Web Platform Installer. Accept all defaults.
[Note] The VM in my lab could not reach the install location so I installed it on my laptop and copied over the PHP dir to the VM to C:\Program Files (x86)\PHP\v5.3
We’re now ready to run the setup.ps1 available here
If the stars are aligned you should see something similar to this!
At that point i expected to be able to browse to the IP of my VM and see WebCommander running but i was getting a 404 error like below
I did a little digging and found that there was no php handler in IIS (This may be a by product of not actually installing the Microsoft Web Platform Installer as i mentioned earlier. I haven’t gotten around to testing that). So here’s what i did to resolve it
Open IIS and click on the server and under IIS double click Handler Mappings
In the Actions pane click Add Module Mapping
Add the module mapping like below. Make sure the path to php-cgi.exe is valid
Now when you browse to your IP you should see WebCommander
Hopefully someone finds this useful!!
I’ll do a follow up post once i get a chance to add some of my scripts
LifeOfBrianOC 