Introduction

Nerdio recently released two very very powerful features which integrate together to enable complete automation capability for Windows Virtual Desktop with the click of a few buttons. These two features are Scripted Actions, and GitHub Integration.

The GitHub integration capacity enables us to link our existing GitHub repositories which may contain all of your scripts that you use to maintain your environments with, with your Nerdio installation.

Scripted Actions is a feature which enables us to run scripts at certain trigger points i.e. when we create our master image, or when we create a host VM, or when the host VM starts up. These two meet together because now we can automatically import our scripts, and then run those scripts using the Scripted Actions. Pretty cool eh!!

An example of this is below, where I am building a Master Image, I can using multiple scripted actions to configure the image how I want it, without ever having to log onto the image.

So now we will walk through on how to get this up and running. To use this functionality you need to be running the very latest version of Nerdio Manager for WVD which is v2.10.0

1) Configure GitHub permissions and create a personal token

We need to give GitHub the permissions for Nerdio to access our private repository so log into your GitHub Repository and go over to Settings\Developer Settings and then click on Personal Access Tokens. Then Select Generate new token:

Enter a name for the token, and select the following permissions:

• Repo
• read:repo_hook
• delete_repo

Once you have done that click on OK, and then you should get a personal token. Note down this token and keep it in a safe place, you will need it later !

2) Link your Nerdio install to the GitHub repo

Head over to the Nerdio Console and go to Settings, Integrations and then GitHub repositories. Firstly, select Add Token and then add in the personal access token which we just created:

Now select Link and Manage Repository and enter your GitHub account details:

Select the Access token we used previously, and also ensure that the Branch is correct. I had to rename my branch from Master to Main to get this to work.

If you have multiple different script types that you want to import, you can select then here. We can also select subfolders to import also. The default settings will automatically import all the *.PS1 scripts in all subfolders and automatically synchronise them.

After pressing OK, the GitHub repo will be linked, and all the existing PowerShell scripts will be synced automatically and made available to run within Nerdio Manager for WVD!

Now we when we go to run a scripted action we will see the scripts available to run.

Summary

As you can see this is a very very powerful feature which has unlimited use cases. If you have used these to perform some really cool automation, or if you have any features or improvements you would like to see then please let me know by dropping me an email to nmcloughlin@getnerdio.com.