concept PowerShell Gallery in category powershell
This is an excerpt from Manning's book Learn PowerShell Scripting in a Month of Lunches.
We’re assuming that the Pester module is available on your system; on Windows 10 or later, it will be, by default. If you don’t have the module, you need to install it first from the PowerShell Gallery by running Install-Module Pester.
If you’re running Windows 10, the shipping version of the Pester module is likely to be outdated. Unfortunately, updating the module from the PowerShell Gallery is problematic. You can’t uninstall the shipping version (at least, not easily), and you may run into problems trying to get the latest version. See the blog post “Power-Shell PackageManagement and PowerShellGet Module Changes in Windows 10 Version 1511, 1607, and 1703” from Microsoft MVP Mike Robbins (August 3, 2017, http://mng.bz/40c7) for more detail. As a last resort, you should be able to install the latest version of the Pester module and have it run side by side with the shipping version with this command:
The PowerShell Gallery is a free website maintained by Microsoft at www.powershellgallery.com, although you’re most likely to interact with it using a set of PowerShell cmdlets like Find-Module and Install-Module. Microsoft does a pretty good job of scanning uploads, especially to ensure that they follow scripting best practices. Microsoft will run your code through the PowerShell Script Analyzer commands, and it’s possible to be initially denied if your code fails certain tests. If you use VS Code to develop your tools and pass the tests there, you should be ok. Microsoft also can’t guarantee the effectiveness of a module, so anything you download and run is at your own risk. But that’s why you have a test environment, right?
This is an excerpt from Manning's book Windows PowerShell in Action, Third Edition.
As of PowerShell v5 you have two broad categories of module availability. The first category, manual installation, has been available since modules were introduced in PowerShell v2. Manual installation encompasses modules you write yourself and those you may explicitly copy or download from other sources. The second category, automatic installation, was introduced with PowerShell v5 and the PowerShell Gallery—a public gallery of modules you can reuse. Access to the gallery is done through (surprise!) a module called PowerShellGet. The PowerShellGet module includes commands to find and install modules from the PowerShell Gallery. You can also add public or private repositories to the search path.
Within the PrivateData element you have the option to complete the PSData hashtable. This hashtable provides data for module discovery in online repositories such as the PowerShell Gallery. An example, from the Pester module (installed in Windows 10 or available from the PowerShell Gallery), is here.