Method to integrate Powershell scripts with non-Windows workflow?

I've spent hours pounding on this very problem and it eventually came down to two viable options (there are a lot of non-viable options out there):

  1. Build a Windows box with an IIS service hosting a WebAPI that is both domained and set up in such a way that WinRM sessions from it will work.
  2. Cygwin

With the second option you're stuck fighting your way through the the GNU/Posix abstraction layer to get at the actual windows bits. Which does restrict what you're able to do with it.

The first option pretty much builds a web-based abstraction layer you write yourself on top of your full native-stack Windows install. If you're willing to put in the work, the Linux master-server only has to do a bunch of curl calls to do what needs doing. This works best when scripts are fire-and-forget though, as building a call-back system is a lot more effort.


You can also buy cross-platform scheduling or workflow automation software that can kick off native scripts on many hosts depending on previous actions, or even their returned results. Large enterprises use software like Tivoli, UC4, Espresso (CA dSeries, now) that does this, and I've used it at large enterprises that needed to do this sort of thing. FYI, these often have native support for things like Oracle jobs, to give you an idea of the pricetag you might be looking at.

(In my past job, they also used Cygwin anyway, so that they could use the same Perl scripts without modification when workloads moved between platforms. Lots of fun.)

You could also try to build your own, as @sysadmin1138 suggests; that would be a fun project, and might even end up robust enough to be usable and not get you paged at 2 AM when the financial exports fail on the first try.


I would use the Powershell Web Access feature introduced in Powershell v3.0. This allows you to use Powershell scripts from a Linux host.


PowerShell server lets you SSH in to a Windows server and get a PowerShell console. I haven't used it beyond the free trial, but my informal use proved to me it was a fairly reliable product.