I’ve been working a lot with building some test and development environments for systems that didn’t have them. And as those ‘unimportant’ features have been missed out, it wasn’t too suprising to find that the Build documentation for the servers was less than stellar.

So, how could I make sure that the test and dev boxes had the same Windows Roles and Features without wasting too much time. Well, PowerShell is quickly becoming my default answer to anything like this. And it turns out there’s a nice 1 liner you can put together to do it as well (well, 1 liner if you’ve already got the module imported 🙂 )

 

Import-Module ServerManager
Get-WindowsFeature | Where-Object {$_.Installed -eq $True} | Install-WindowsFeature -computername devbox

First up we import the ServerManager module, it’s loaded by default if you’re running Windows Server 2012 but it’s always good practice to make sure you’ve got it.

Get-WindowsFeature returns a list of all the available Roles and Features on the server, we filter that with Where-Object so we only have those roles and features that are installed. Then we pass the whole lot to Install-WindowsFeature and tell it to install it onto the remote box.

And the nice feature of Install-WindowsFeature is that it will only install anything that’s missing, so this snippet can be used to check for missing sub features