AWS Powershell Tools: Where's the rest of the information?

If you haven't noticed, I'm a proponent of using AWS Powershell tools for managing your AWS resources. There's a bit of a learning curve if you're not already familiar with Powershell or .NET, but Amazon has put a significant amount of time into developing the .NET class structure behind the Tools, which creates a pretty rich tool set.


However, for the novice user this can be a bit confusing. I recently did a post on finding where your AWS Codepipeline artifacts get stored, and demonstrated both a CLI method for using it, and a Powershell method.

The CLI method is pretty straightforward the command here:

dumps out a HUGE json blob with all of the information you could ever want about your Pipeline. Stages, name, pipeline ID, and artifactore are all right there.

And you might expect the Powershell tools to be just as informative right away, but you'd be wrong. The equivalent command in powershell returns much less:

At first, I reacted the way you probably would: with frustration. Quite a bit of it! Where's all the information I got out of the CLI?

A handy dandy powershell command to know is "Get-Member" which returns the functions and properties of an object. Let's give it a try on what's returned from Codepipeline:

And there it is! There's an "artifactstore" property, so with the simple:

(Get-CPPipeline -name ).artifactstore

I have the artifact store. But let's zoom in a little on what "Get-Member" returned for me:

And now I can see that there is also a set method for this object! If I have the proper permissions I can set the artifact store as well as view it. Continued examination shows me other properties, including the name, have get and set attributes as well. Pretty handy!