Add "Copy for Powershell" for Windows/Powershell users

[eskibars]

Currently we have 2 options: for our CONSOLified docs: Copy as cURL and View in Console. The former is easy to understand for our *nix users and the latter is easy to understand for anybody running Kibana, but neither really helps our Windows users understand/build/automate queries in their platform. That is, you can download curl for Windows, but that's an extra several steps to hunt it down, making the getting started experience not so great. Also, there's a Powershell alias for curl but it's not compatible with the "standard" *nix curl command for the vast majority of examples that show up in our docs.

It'd be nice to have a "native" Copy for Powershell type of option for Windows users which copies the appropriate Invoke-WebRequest and the appropriate IRM parameters.

/cc @russcam @Mpdreamz

[russcam]

++ I think you meant to suggest Invoke-RestMethod? With this, the user gets back the json parsed in a hashtable structure that can be easily traversed and output in PowerShell

[eskibars]

yes, sorry -- Invoke-RestMethod (it's been a long week :))

[russcam]

Circling back on this. We have released a small PowerShell module that provides a similar experience to curl for PowerShell and PowerShell Core (cross-platform):

https://www.powershellgallery.com/packages/Elastic.Console/7.6.0-rc1

It uses Invoke-WebRequest under the covers but hides a lot of the complexity. In addition, it provides API path and method autocompletion based on the REST API specs. I’d be more than happy to demo it sometime.

Thoughts on presenting this as an option in the docs?

[eskibars]

cc @sethpayne

My biggest concern is that it requires another piece of software to install. That was one of the reasons I was thinking about doing this via a built-in command (vs, e.g. asking them to download curl for Windows).

[russcam]

I share your concern. A problem in providing Invoke-WebRequest though is that reading the content of the response is different depending on whether PowerShell or PowerShell Core is used, as the underlying implementation uses different .NET types; See

https://github.com/elastic/powershell/blob/04e906d910004e31fb89c855873d1bd3898815a4/Elastic.Console/Elastic.Console.psm1#L833-L855

Reading the content could be placed on the user to ascertain.

An advantage in using a module is that installation is built into PowerShell/PowerShell Core

Install-Module Elastic.Console -AllowPrerelease