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Relax PSScriptAnalyzer rules for tests/ folder

Open Beginner friendly
#136 1 comment 0 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub

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Assessment

Difficulty
2/5
Estimated time
1-3 hours
Newbie friendliness
84/100
Issue type
Feature
Clarity
Clearly specified
Activity status
Quiet
Tech stack
github-actions, powershell
Domain
ci-cd, tooling

Research direction

Start in .github/workflows/analysis.yml and inspect the existing Invoke-ScriptAnalyzer and SARIF upload steps. Keep the PSGallery analysis for modules/, add a separate tests/ pass with the listed exclusions, and combine both result sets before generating results.sarif. Done means the workflow still uploads SARIF while test-only helper warnings are excluded.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

good first issue Improvement PowerShell

Background

I've bumped into PSScriptAnalyzer / GitHub code-scanning warnings on files in the tests/ folder a couple of times when writing test helpers that start with verbs that (in a public API) have some conventions around then (like New). These rules aren't really applicable to test code. A recent example: a test helper named New-Frame tripped PSUseShouldProcessForStateChangingFunctions because New is an approved state-changing verb, so the analyzer expects the function to support -WhatIf/-Confirm.

These are linter conventions meant for exported, public cmdlets, not for test scaffolding. The tests/ folder isn't part of our public API, so applying the full PSGallery ruleset there generates noise (and a review-bot comment on every PR that adds such a helper).

Where these come from

The warnings are produced by the analysis workflow in .github/workflows/analysis.yml:

```powershell
Invoke-ScriptAnalyzer -Path . -Recurse -Settings PSGallery | ConvertTo-SARIF -FilePath results.sarif
```

The resulting SARIF is uploaded to GitHub code scanning, which is what renders the inline PR comments. GitHub has no per-path mute for third-party SARIF — the only lever is what we feed into the analyzer.

Suggested fix

Run the analyzer in two passes: the full ruleset on modules/, and a relaxed ruleset on tests/ that excludes the rules which are inherently meaningless for test helpers:

```powershell
$results = Invoke-ScriptAnalyzer -Path ./modules -Recurse -Settings PSGallery
$results += Invoke-ScriptAnalyzer -Path ./tests -Recurse -Settings PSGallery -ExcludeRule PSUseShouldProcessForStateChangingFunctions, PSUseApprovedVerbs, PSAvoidUsingWriteHost $results | ConvertTo-SARIF -FilePath results.sarif \``

We can add to the the -ExcludeRule list over time if there are other analyzers that don't make sense for the tests.

Alternatives considered

Neither of these are ideal:

  • Drop tests/ from the scan entirely (-Path ./modules): simplest, but loses all linting on tests.
  • Repo-wide PSScriptAnalyzerSettings.psd1 with ExcludeRules: not path-aware, so it would also disable the rule for modules/, where we want it.

Context: came up while reviewing #135.

Dominant language
PowerShell
Stars
16
Forks
5
Avg merge
11h 24m
Merged PRs (30d)
5

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