A first look at Desired State Configuration v3

Figure 1: Enacting configurations in Desired State Configuration (v2)

On many popular forums, the question arose “is Desired State Configuration still alive”? If you look at the statistics on the PowerShell Gallery, many popular DSC Resources are still being updated frequently.

Figure 2: DSC Resources in PowerShell Gallery sorted by recent

You might also not be aware that the PowerShell team has released the alpha version of DSCv3, which is publicly available.

To return to the question, " Is Desired State Configuration still alive?” Personally, I would say it is!

DSCv3 has been wholly rewritten and became open-source. This article will explain the differences from v2.

Getting Started with DSCv3

To start with DSCv3, you might expect to install a module using the Install-Module cmdlet. That’s actually the first difference between v2. DSCv3 is a command-line application. Thus, you need to download it and add the folder content to your PATH variable. You can download the latest version from GitHub or run the following PowerShell script on Windows.

function Add-Path($Path) {
    $Path = [Environment]::GetEnvironmentVariable("PATH", "Machine") + [IO.Path]::PathSeparator + $Path…