The build process uses PSDepend to download dependencies such as resource modules into the build output folder. All resource modules used by your configurations need to be added to the dependencies to be downloaded automatically.

This can also be done on the fly by executing the build script with the Resolve-Dependency switch parameter set. In this case, PSDepend will try to download all dependencies from the configured resources, such as GitHub and the PowerShell gallery. Before any MOF files are compiled, integration tests are executed to at least check if all configuration data is in the proper format and that there are no syntax errors.

If all pre-flight tests have passed, the build script attempts to build all MOF files by using the configuration data for each node. During this process, a Resultant Set of Policy (RSoP) is created in the build output folder. It is referenced by the Git commit ID, and contains all settings applied to each node.

After the MOF files have been created, all LCM configurations will be built. You can add additional test cases to check, for example, if all MOF and meta.mof files have indeed been built.

With the MOF and meta.mof files, you can do what you like. You can either have your CI server push them actively to development nodes, or provide them on a pull server so that the nodes download them at some point.

We recommend pushing the node configuration, thereby fulfilling the CD part of the CI/CD pipeline. Pushing to the nodes and waiting for the process to finish has the added benefit that you can integrate the result of this action into your CI/CD pipeline as well. It might, however, increase your build time significantly.