Run GitHub Actions Workflows On Windows Server and PowerShell

Since the release of GitHub, Actions Microsoft has made Windows Server runners available to run workflows with PowerShell available.

This post will show how to use Windows Server 2016, 2019 and the latest release with GitHub Actions.

Windows Runner

To run workflows on Windows runners, we need to specify in the workflow that we need to run the workflow on a Windows machine.

Currently, GitHub Actions offer the following Windows runner:

Runner name	Description
windows-2016	Windows Server 2016
windows-2019	Windows Server 2019
Windows-latest	Latest Windows server release

Workflow

In the following workflow example, I am using a Windows Server 2019 build to run a workflow that runs PowerShell commands.

Note: All Windows Server runners run PowerShell 7.1.3

The below code run a few PowerShell command, and a Docker run commands the pull a Windows IIS image and runs it inside the runner.

name: How to use a Windows Runner on GitHub Actions
on: push

jobs:
  build:

    runs-on: windows-2019
    steps:
      - name: Check out repo        
        uses: actions/checkout@v2
      - run: |
          $psversiontable
          write-host "Hello World"
          get-computerinfo
          docker run --name myiisserver -d  mcr.microsoft.com/windows/servercore/iis:windowsservercore-ltsc2019