autounattend is a CLI tool that help you build autounattend.xml files.

Motivation

Writing dynamic autounattend.xml files can be tedious. This tool simplifies the process by requiring you to write a meta, simplified config.yml file that describes your needs. Additionally, anything but trivial scripting might require external ps1/cmd scripts that have to be referenced from your autounattend.xml. However, depending on your provisioning pattern (e.g., USB stick / Terraform cd_contents provisioner), finding the "provisioning drive" can be a complex task.

The simplest macro, $drive=([System.IO.DriveInfo]::getdrives() | Where-Object { Test-Path -Path ($_.Name+"\\autounattend.xml")} | Select-Object -first 1).Name;, can make every command line complex. Furthermore, I wanted to have standalone and portable autounattended.xml files.

This script inlines all external script files you might want to reference into base64-encoded metadata and makes them available directly in the autounattended.xml. The script will use a simple xml query introspecting lookup and Invoke-Expression. Therefore, the generated autounattended.xml file is portable and stanalone.

config.yml + scripts/folder => cnyks autounattend => :boom:boom:sparkles: standalone autounattend.xml :boom:boom:sparkles:

Advanced

You might want to use the UseConfigurationSet macro, which copies whatever file you have in your provisioning folder into a %windows% subfolder and makes it available behind the %configurationset% macro. Again, autounattend.js inlines any script you might want to use, so there should be no requirements for this.

Usage

# Write config.yml file.(see syntax template below)
npm install -g cnyks autounattend

cnyks autounattend config.yml --ir://run=generate
# Enjoy

Example configuration

hostname: makeitshort
windows:
  product_key: $PRODUCT_KEY
administrator:
  password: $PASSWORD

hostcommands:
  - dism.exe /online /Enable-Feature /FeatureName:Containers /All /norestart

usercommands:
  - cmd.exe /c "echo hi >> c:\\traces"

  - type: powershell
    file: scripts/enable-rdp.ps1

  - type: powershell
    file: scripts/enable-winrm.ps1

  - type: powershell
    command: |
      Set-MpPreference -DisableArchiveScanning 1 -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue;
      Set-MpPreference -DisableArchiveScanning 1 -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue;
      Set-MpPreference -DisableBehaviorMonitoring 1 -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue;
      Set-MpPreference -DisableIntrusionPreventionSystem 1 -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue;
      Set-MpPreference -DisableIOAVProtection 1 -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue;
      Set-MpPreference -DisableRemovableDriveScanning 1 -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue;
      Set-MpPreference -DisableBlockAtFirstSeen 1 -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue;
      Set-MpPreference -DisableScanningMappedNetworkDrivesForFullScan 1 -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue;
      Set-MpPreference -DisableScanningNetworkFiles 1 -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue;
      Set-MpPreference -DisableScriptScanning 1 -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue;
      Set-MpPreference -DisableRealtimeMonitoring 1 -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue;

Credits

• 131