Good Bye Import-CliXML – Use the Secrets Management module for your labs and demos

Don’t want to read all this? There are two dotnet interactive notebooks here with the relevant information for you to use.

https://beard.media/dotnetnotebooks

Jaap is awesome

I have to start here. For the longest time, whenever anyone has asked me how I store my credentials for use in my demos and labs I have always referred them to Jaap Brassers t blog post

https://www.jaapbrasser.com/quickly-and-securely-storing-your-credentials-powershell/

Joel is also awesome!

When people wanted a method of storing credentials that didn’t involve files on disk I would suggest Joel Bennett’s t module BetterCredentials which uses the Windows Credential Manager

https://www.powershellgallery.com/packages/BetterCredentials/4.5

Microsoft? Also awesome!

In February, Microsoft released the SecretManagement module for preview.

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/powershell/secrets-management-development-release/

Sydney t gave a presentation at the European PowerShell Conference which you can watch on Youtube.

Good Bye Import-CliXML

So now I say, it is time to stop using Import-Clixml for storing secrets and use the Microsoft.PowerShell.SecretsManagement module instead for storing your secrets.

Notebooks are as good as blog posts

I love notebooks and to show some people who had asked about storing secrets, I have created some. So, because I am efficient lazy I have embedded them here for you to see. You can find them in my Jupyter Notebook repository

https://beard.media/dotnetnotebooks

in the Secrets folder

Installing and using the Secrets Management Module

These notebooks may not display on a mobile device unfortunately

Using the Secret Management Module in your scripts

Here is a simple example of using the module to provide the credential for a docker container and then to dbatools to query the container

These notebooks may not display on a mobile device unfortunately