Common Windows issues

Troubleshooting Common Windows issues

Accessing environment variables from your application

Description: You can’t access the variable directly by using $VAR_NAME.

Solution: You can reference the variable in subsequent parts of your workflow by using $env:VAR_NAME.

But when using a variable to set another variable in the vars: section directly like this:

environment:
      vars:
        VAR_1: ---\$VAR_2\---

The default shell on the Windows machines is PowerShell. If you want to run a script using the Command Prompt you can do this:

cmd.exe \c YOUR_COMMAND_HERE

When PowerShell sees a command starting with a string it just evaluates the string, that is, it typically echos it to the screen, for example:

PS> "C:\Program Files\Unity Hub\Unity Hub.exe"
Hello World

If you want PowerShell to interpret the string as a command name then use the call operator (&) like so:

& 'C:\Program Files\Unity Hub\Unity Hub.exe' ...

If you want to run an exe file in PowerShell with parameters with spaces and quotes you can use the Start-Process method like this:

Start-Process -NoNewWindow -FilePath "path-to-your-exe-file" -ArgumentList 'your-arguments-are-here' -Wait

You can decode the $VAR1 variable into the path $PATH using the following script:

[Text.Encoding]::UTF8.GetString([Convert]::FromBase64String("$env:VAR1")) | Out-File -FilePath $env:PATH

Linux and macOS machines can be accessed using SSH or VNC.

However, you can’t access a Windows build machine using VNC, and you should use an RDP client instead.