Passing Parameters to a Pester Test

A useful snippet if you don't want to hard-code values in a Pester test, either because you want to re-use the test for other situations or to provide values from a CI system at runtime. Pester normally takes a Script parameter as a string to a single test or a set of wildcarded tests. Handily, it also accepts a hash with the Path mapping to the original script argument and Parameters as a nested hash of name value pairs passed as parameters to each test script.

Import-Module Pester

Invoke-Pester -Script @{ Path = '.\*.Tests.ps1'; Parameters = @{ Cookie = 'Chocolate Chip'; Count = 99 } }

The parameters surface in the test script using the usual param block. If you need positional parameters in a script (but why would you?) you can pass a comma separated list using the Arguments property in the hash.

If Pester is running as part of a CI build, you can also use the return value from Pester to trigger exiting the script with a return value and failing the build.

Import-Module Pester

$Result = Invoke-Pester -Script @{ Path = '.\*.Tests.ps1'; Parameters = @{ Cookie = 'Chocolate Chip'; Count = 99 } }

If ($Result.FailedCount -ne 0) {
	Write-Error 'Cookie Monster Tests failed'
    exit 1
}

Speaking of integrating with CI builds, Pester also supports writing out test results in NUnit xml format so that they can be ingested and processed by other standard tools.

Invoke-Pester -OutputFile 'PesterResults.xml' -OutputFormat 'NUnitXml' ...