The Better Credentials Module

The goal of BetterCredentials is to provide a completely backwards-compatible Get-Credential command that enhances the in-the-box Get-Credential by adding additional features which are missing from the built-in command. Specifically, storing credentials for automation, and providing more complete prompts with an explanation of what the credentials are for.

TO INSTALL:

Use the PowerShellGet module included in WMF (PowerShell) 5, or the PackageManagement Preview for PowerShell 3 and 4.

Just run:

    Install-Module BetterCredentials -AllowClobber

The -AllowClobber switch is to allow the BetterCredentials module to do what it's designed to do: provide you a better, backwards compatible Get-Credential command, clobbering the built-in version.

Features

Prompting

The original motivation for writing BetterCredentials was to take advantage of some of the features of PowerShell's underlying credential API which are inexplicably ignored in the built-in Get-Credential, particularly to allow one-off prompting for passwords inline (that is, in the console, instead of via the credentials dialog), without having to resort to a configuration change.

You can use the -Inline switch to force prompting in the host instead of with a popup dialog, or even pass in a -Password value (secure string or not, I won't judge) which allows you to easily create credential objects without a prompt at all.

Additionally, you can set the -Title parameter to control the text that's show at the top of the prompt window, and even set the -Description parameter to add text in the prompt.

Storage

Despite the fact that this feature arrived late in the life of BetterCredentials, clearly the best feature is the fact that it can store your passwords in the Windows Credential Manager (sometimes called the Vault), and retrive them on demand so you don't have to enter them over and over. The Windows Credential Manager is what's used by Internet Explorer and Remote Desktop to store passwords, and it keeps them safely encrypted to your account and machine, and provides a user interface where they can be securely reviewed, deleted or even modified.

On our BetterCredentials\Get-Credential command, the -Store switch causes the returned credentials to be stored in the vault, and the -Delete switch makes sure they are not. As of version 4.5, you can also use the Set-Credential and Remove-Credental commands to explicitly store or remove credentials.

Once you've stored credentials in the vault, future requests for the same credential -- where you pass in a username (and optionally, a domain) will simply return the credentials without prompting. Because of this, there is also a -Force switch (alias: -New) which prevents loading and forces the prompt to be displayed. When you need to change a stored password, use both together:

BetterCredentials\Get-Credential -Force -Store

Additionally, in 4.5 there are two commands for searching and/or testing for credentials in the vault: Find-Credential and Test-Credential...

Unattended Usage

When Get-Credential is called from a script running unattended, e.g. in a scheduled task, script execution will hang prompting for credentials if there is no credential in the vault corresponding to the given username. Normally one might execute Get-Credential username -Store to populate the credential vault prior to putting the scheduled task into production, but might also forget to do so. In version 4.5 the new Test-Credential command solves the script hanging problem by returning a true or false value depending on whether a credential corresponding to a user name is currently stored in the vault.

NOTES

In my scripts and sample code, I nearly always use BetterCredentials\Get-Credential as a way to make sure that I'm invoking this overload of Get-Credential, but the idea is that you can simply import the BetterCredentials module in your profile and automatically get this overload whenever you're calling Get-Credential. Of course, I haven't (yet) overloaded the [Credential] transform attribute, so the automatic prompting when you pass a user name to a -Credential attribute doesn't use my module -- you have to explicitly call Get-Credential.

Licensed under MIT license, see License.