coder templates pull does not work as expected on Windows

[bpmct]

Screen.Recording.2023-08-23.at.5.17.19.PM.mov

It creates a folder, but no files

[matifali]

First Issue

I can pull a template just fine when I specify a path as instructed by coder templates pull --help

PS C:\Users\matif\tmp> coder templates pull deeplearning
Extracting template to "deeplearning/"
PS C:\Users\matif\tmp> coder templates pull deeplearning PATH
Extracting template to "PATH"
PS C:\Users\matif\tmp> ls .\deeplearning\
PS C:\Users\matif\tmp> ls .\PATH\

    Directory: C:\Users\matif\tmp\PATH

Mode                 LastWriteTime         Length Name
----                 -------------         ------ ----
-a---          25/08/2023 10:17 am          10852 deeplearning-connect.png
-a---          25/08/2023 10:17 am          11401 main.tf
-a---          25/08/2023 10:17 am           2181 README.md

When we do not provide a path, the folder is empty
When we provide a path, the folder contains all the files

2nd Issue

When using the --tar and writing output to a file, the archive only contains the README.md and missing other files.

coder templates pull --tar deeplearning > zipped.tar.gz

other alternatives I have tried, but with the same effect.

coder templates pull --tar deeplearning | Out-File -Path zipped.tar.gz

---

PS: Both of these pull methods work as expected on Linux(Ubuntu) and macOS(confirmed by @mtojek)

[mtojek]

Regarding 2nd issue -

I'm not a Windows developer, but it was always a problem to redirect binary output. See this article. Maybe you should try it @matifali .

[matifali]

I investigated it a bit more and found out that by default, PowerShell converts the output to string and to keep the data as binary, we need to enable an experimental flag PSNativeCommandPreserveBytePipe as discussed in PowerShell/PowerShell#1908 (comment). This is only available in PowerShell version 7.4.x, while the current version on Windows 11 is 7.3.

[matifali]

Using PowerShell 7.4.0-preview.5 resolves issue 2 in #9291 (comment).

[spikecurtis]

I think the 2nd issue that @matifali identified is out of scope of this GitHub issue. There isn't much we can do about Powershell breaking binary redirection.

However, we could add an option to take a --tarfile and write the tar directly to disk if Windows devs wanted it.

[matifali]

@spikecurtis For the second issue, I guess we should wait for PowerShell 7.4 to be widely available as it is not an issue with Coder. This issue can be closed if we solve 1st.