Validate Module Locally

Use this script to test a module from your PC locally, without a CI environment. You can use it to run only the static validation (Pester tests), a deployment validation (dryRun) or an actual deployment to Azure. In the latter cases the script also takes care to replace placeholder tokens in the used module test & template files for you.

Location

You can find the script under utilities/tools/Test-ModuleLocally.ps1

How it works

If the switch for Pester tests (-PesterTest) is provided the script will

  1. Invoke the module test for the provided template file path and run all tests for it.

If the switch for either the validation test (-ValidationTest) or deployment test (-DeploymentTest) is provided alongside a HashTable for the token replacement (-ValidateOrDeployParameters), the script will

  1. Either fetch all module test files of the module’s tests folder (default) or you can specify a single module test file by leveraging the -ModuleTestFilePath parameter instead.
  2. Create a dictionary to replace all tokens in these module test files with actual values. This dictionary will consist
    • of the subscriptionID & managementGroupID of the provided ValidateOrDeployParameters object,
    • add all key-value pairs of the -AdditionalTokens object to it,
    • and optionally also add all key-value pairs specified in the settings.yml, under the ’local tokens settings'.
  3. If the -ValidationTest parameter was set, it runs a deployment validation using the Test-TemplateDeployment script.
  4. If the -DeploymentTest parameter was set, it runs a deployment using the New-TemplateDeployment script (with no retries).
  5. As a final step, it rolls the module test files back to their original state if either the -ValidationTest or -DeploymentTest parameters were provided.

How to use it

For details on how to use the function, please refer to the script’s local documentation.

Note

The script must be loaded (’dot-sourced’) before the function can be invoked.

. 'C:/dev/Test-ModuleLocally.ps1'
Test-ModuleLocally (...)
Important

Important: As the script emulates the testing logic of the CI environment, also tokens such as #_namePrefix_# are replaced by the script. However, in addition to the CI environment, it also reverses the token replacement to recover the files’ original state. As such, ensure that you use a namePrefix value that is unlikely to overlap with any string value in module folder you want to test.

For example, do not use avm, as the reverse token replacement would incorrectly replace the deployment name avmTelemetry found in each module to #_namePrefix_#Telemetry.