If possible, update the path for Puppet after a provider run

[bdruth]

Is there a trick by which packages installed by chocolatey that update the Machine Path (i.e. [System.Environment]::GetEnvironmentVariable("Path","Machine")) can be used by subsequent Exec calls in the same puppet apply run? I'm having difficulty with nodejs.install and subsequently using the Powershell provider (puppetlabs/powershell) to run npm commands.

Any tricks to make this work? I've created an issue w/ the powershell provider as well, because I can't seem to provide an up-to-date path => ... to the Exec, which seems like a shortcoming or bug of some sort.

[ferventcoder]

This is the million dollar Windows question. Windows does not refresh the path for the current shell, so it can cause issues. The workaround is to determine where something will install and use that as the path.

[ferventcoder]

It is a shortcoming for Windows, and every tool suffers.

[rismoney]

By default, a child process inherits the environment variables of its parent process. The problem is that with a tool like puppet everything becomes a child process for execution purposes.
The potential work around might involve creating a new process and passing it a pointer to updated env variables. Not sure... But everyone and every product is suffering from this...

[bdruth]

Sigh. OK - thanks.

[ferventcoder]

I added https://tickets.puppetlabs.com/browse/PUP-4708 to follow up on whether this is something we can add to Puppet.

[ferventcoder]

There are a few tricks. Perhaps we can make the provider perform them. :)

[steve-hawkins]

I'm sure this module does what you are after : -

https://forge.puppetlabs.com/counsyl/windows#windowsrefresh_environment