Update CI for meterpreter vs2022

[dledda-r7]

No description provided.

[smcintyre-r7]

Do you have any background that you can provide on these changes? I see the cmd code was switched to powershell and that vs_installer.exe is now run. Is this required to unblock some other PR or remove something that was deprecated or broken? Lastly do you have any suggestions for testing it to make sure it's working correctly?

[dledda-r7]

@zeroSteiner, this change was requested by @AlanFoster, i think (Alan correct me if I am wrong) this is used when we want to test something on metasploit-payloads repo with a metasploit-framework branch that is not rapid7/master.
The usage of powershell is required, so i switched everything to powershell. What we are doing here is updating the VS2022 installation to support XP and other stuff we need.

[adfoster-r7]

Tested here: rapid7/metasploit-payloads#766

VS2022 build output:

https://github.com/rapid7/metasploit-payloads/actions/runs/17374128806/job/49316653585?pr=766

The logs show that the vs components install successfully:

Mon, 01 Sep 2025 10:09:25 GMT components have been successfully added

But, it looks like the build logs are missing - which would be useful for debugging build failures

Mon, 01 Sep 2025 10:09:29 GMT Id      : 5780
Mon, 01 Sep 2025 10:09:29 GMT Handles : 20
Mon, 01 Sep 2025 10:09:29 GMT CPU     : 0
Mon, 01 Sep 2025 10:09:29 GMT SI      : 2
Mon, 01 Sep 2025 10:09:29 GMT Name    : cmd
Mon, 01 Sep 2025 10:09:29 GMT
Mon, 01 Sep 2025 10:23:20 GMT

Based on the last two timestamps it looks like the build took around the time we'd expect it to take, but there's no logs present - it'd be great to fix that 🙌

[dledda-r7]

@adfoster-r7 any idea how to include them?

[smcintyre-r7]

@adfoster-r7 any idea how to include them?

I think the issue is rooted in the change to Powershell and the invocation through Start-Process. You can replicate this behavior on the command line. Taking ssh -h as an example command that prints some messages and exits with a non-0 status code, you can see that in Powershell cmd /c ssh -h prints to stdout, where as Start-Process -FilePath cmd.exe -ArgumentList ('/c', 'ssh', '-h') -Wait -PassThru -WindowStyle Hidden does not.

I think for this use case, we'd be better off not invoking processes through Start-Process unless it's necessary. I think if you simplified things to cmd /c ... you'd get the output you need. It'd be a good idea to also implement this change for the installation process itself. You can check the last status code with $LASTEXITCODE to determine if it failed or not.

[smcintyre-r7]

I have not tested the code suggestions I've made but I think they might address the issue where we don't have the output we're looking for.

[smcintyre-r7]

Suggested change

	$WorkLoads = '--config "D:\a\metasploit-payloads\metasploit-payloads\metasploit-payloads\c\meterpreter\vs-configs\vs2022.vsconfig"'
	$Arguments = ('/c', "vs_installer.exe", 'modify', '--installPath', "`"$InstallPath`"", $WorkLoads, '--quiet', '--norestart', '--nocache')
	$process = Start-Process -FilePath cmd.exe -ArgumentList $Arguments -Wait -PassThru -WindowStyle Hidden
	if ($process.ExitCode -eq 0) {
	cmd.exe /c vs_installer.exe modify --installPath "$InstallPath" --config "D:\a\metasploit-payloads\metasploit-payloads\metasploit-payloads\c\meterpreter\vs-configs\vs2022.vsconfig" --quiet --norestart --nocache'
	if ($LASTEXITCODE -eq 0) {

[smcintyre-r7]

Suggested change

	Start-Process -FilePath cmd.exe -ArgumentList ('/c', 'git', 'submodule', 'init', '&&', 'git', 'submodule', 'update') -Wait -PassThru -WindowStyle Hidden
	Start-Process -FilePath cmd.exe -ArgumentList ('/c', '"C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio\2022\Enterprise\Common7\Tools\VsDevCmd.bat"', '&&', 'make.bat') -Wait -PassThru -WindowStyle Hidden
	cmd.exe /c git submodule init
	cmd.exe /c git submodule update
	cmd.exe /c '"C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio\2022\Enterprise\Common7\Tools\VsDevCmd.bat" && make.bat'

Notice the third one uses single quotes so the path can still be in double while both bat files run in the same cmd instance.