A gShell present for you. (Hint: It's shiny and new)

[Spencer Varney]

Hi all,

I hope you're having a great holiday season. I wanted to share some good news with you, and give a bit of an update.

GShell will soon provide coverage for the vast majority of Google APIs, on a rapid release cycle.

First, an announcement - moving forward, gShell will be taking a new direction - it will be a fully automated API wrapper for the Google APIs, available on the PowerShell Gallery. Which APIs? All of them*. No more installers, no more delayed releases. If Google releases an API update, gShell will have that update in one or two days**.

You can find the first release of the first api (gShell.Gmail.v1) here. It doesn't have any of the gShell settings Cmdlets, but you can still authenticate and choose your scopes as normal, or you can hook it up to your existing OAuth2 json file that you currently use in gShell (in case you want to play with things side-by-side). While no documentation is yet provided for the cmdlets*** (even with Get-Help) the cmdlet naming convention matches the [Method]-G[ApiName][ApiVersion][Resource] convention, eg List-GGmailV1UsersMessages. While this isn't PoSh-approved, it matches what you can find in the online Google documentation, in case you need help.

While I make some additional headway with documentation and wiki pages, I'll be making other releases for other APIs. For now, I'm starting with the Gmail api and would appreciate any feedback that you may have!

Uh, what? Details please.

*Previously, it was a hand-curated collection of cmdlets geared towards admins that required a lot of work to update and change. If Google updated or added something, I'd be in the dark unless someone let me know. I've been working my butt off in the next (and hopefully final) evolution of gShell, wherein all of the codebase is generated, automatically. Each API will have a separate module in the PowerShell Gallery. Neat!

**The goal is to have the Generator check for updates each night, and if any are found (aka if a new library version is released from  Google) the generator will kick in, generate a new version of the gShell API library and release it out to the Gallery. Additionally, the generated code will be available on Github for review, as always.

***The generator currently doesn't create a help file, so get-help won't work. No pages are being created for the wiki yet, either. BUT, it is in the plan. The current state of the API generator is a mess as I have adopted a rapid prototype and debug cycle which better fits me working in my spare time, with a goal of just getting things done. Someday I'll clean it up and include unit tests. But until then, the end result is what matters :)

Summary

For now, I'm going to take a break. I've been working on this for months and am going nuts. Let me know what you think, ask any questions, let's talk about it - the cat is out of the bag!

HAPPY HOLIDAYS!

Regards,

Spencer

[Jon Parodi]

Thank you so much!

gShell has become a mainstay my arsenal of tools so am always excited to see updates.