Running M365 DSC commands in CI pipeline with firewall blocking access to PowerShell Gallery

[RosalindHook]

I am attempting to run Microsoft 365 DSC (M365 DSC) commands within a CI pipeline in GitLab. However, my organization has blocked access to the PowerShell Gallery due to network security policies, and I am unable to set up a proxy to access it.

As a workaround, I downloaded the required DSC modules and pushed them to Artifactory (a remote repository). In the pipeline, I am downloading and unzipping the modules, and then running the following command to import the module:

Import-Module "$modulePath/Microsoft365DSC.psd1"

After successfully importing the module, I attempt to execute the Export-M365DSCConfiguration command using secret credentials. However, I encounter the following error:

Write-Error: Failed to export M365 DSC Configuration: The term 'Connect-M365Tenant' is not recognized as the name of a cmdlet, function, script file, or executable program.

When running the script locally, I would typically use the Update-M365DSCDependencies command to ensure all required dependencies are installed and updated, but this is not possible in my current CI pipeline setup due to the lack of PowerShell Gallery access. I understand that M365DSC relies on several other modules for its functionality, which are likely out of date in my current environment.

Questions/Clarifications:

1. Is there a way to manually identify which specific modules M365DSC depends on so that I can download and update them independently?
2. Is it necessary to have the most up-to-date version of M365DSC and all its dependencies to resolve the Connect-M365Tenant error, or is there another potential solution I can implement in my CI pipeline to bypass this issue?

[FabienTschanz]

@RosalindHook The required modules with their versions for the current version of Microsoft365DSC can be found here: Modules/Microsoft365DSC/Dependencies/Manifest.psd1. If you install the modules in the system context before running any other commands of the Microsoft365DSC module, you should be fine.

[RosalindHook]

Thank you @FabienTschanz this is really helpful.

I am having a related issue with the dependency PSDesiredStateConfiguration. If I run the command to update all dependencies, everything updates to the versions in the manifest with the exception of PnP.PowerShell. I get this warning:

WARNING: The dependency {PSDesiredStateConfiguration} requires PowerShell Core. Please run Update-M365DSCDependencies
in PowerShell Core.

But I thought the recommendation was to use PowerShell 5.x with DSC? Therefore what should I do about this one dependency requiring a different version?

[FabienTschanz]

If you were to use PowerShell 7, you would need to install that module in the PowerShell 7 shell. If you don't use that, you can safely ignore the message. Current suggestion is, as you wrote, PS 5.1.