I’ve been tooling around with powershell recently, trying to teach myself some basics, and a recent support request which would have previously been done manually looked like a perfect opportunity for a little ps1 script.

The request was to disable a feature on the website which is configured from a setting in the web.config file on each server. Since web.configs are xml files, I thought I could treat it as such, traversing and editing values as needed.

So here it is; pretty lengthy for what it’s doing since I don’t know the nicer ways of doing some things (e.g., var foo = (bar == baz ? 0 : 1), and var sna = !sna), and as such any comments to help out would be appreciated:

[powershell]
function ValueToText([string] $val){
if ($val -eq "1"){return "enabled"}
else {return "disabled"}
}

[System.Xml.XmlDocument] $xd = new-object System.Xml.XmlDocument
# pipe-delimited servers to work against
$servers = "192.168.0.1|192.168.0.2|192.168.0.3"

foreach ($server in $servers.Split("|")) {
write-host "Now configuring " $server

$file = "\\" + $server + "\d$\Web\web.config"
$xd.load($file)

# save a backup, just in case I snafu the site
$xd.save($file + ".bak")

# keys to edit
$nodelist = $xd.selectnodes("/configuration/appSettings/add[contains(@key,’Chat’)]")

foreach ($node in $nodelist) {
$key = $node.getAttribute("key")
$val = $node.getAttribute("value")
$setting = ValueToText($val)

$prompt = $key + " is currently " + $setting + ": toggle this? Y/N"
$toggle = read-host $prompt

if ($toggle -eq "Y" -or $toggle -eq "y"){
if ($val -eq "1") {$newbool = "0"}
else {$newbool = "1"}

$node.setAttribute("value", $newbool)

$newsetting = ValueToText($newbool)
$prompt = $key + " is now " + $newsetting
write-host $prompt
}
}
$xd.save($file)
}
write-host * done *
[/powershell]

It’s probably not much more than a “hello world”, but it certainly helped me out recently 🙂