Getting "Current Sitecore database cannot be established" using Sitecore Powershell Extensions

Question

I'm trying to get my feet wet in Sitecore Powershell. I need to list renderings on a list of items. Some of the script works, like getting the items and outputting the name, but when calling Get-Rendering or Get-LayoutDevice i always get the error:

Current Sitecore database cannot be established, current location is not within a Sitecore content tree.

Google offers no help. What am I doing wrong? The script I am buildling on currently looks like this:

$pages = get-item master:/content/MySite/articles | get-childitem -Recurse | where-object { $_.TemplateName -match "Article" }
$device = Get-LayoutDevice -Default

foreach($page in $pages){
    write-host $page.name
    Get-Rendering -Item $page -Device $device    
}

Answer 1

SPE loses Sitecore context if /sitecore/content/home item is not present and falls back to Windows context.

To force it to use the master database set the location at the top of your script:

Set-Location master:

You can also set the context from the ISE window from the ribbon:

This was raised as an issue on Github and has been fixed in SPE 4.2 so that the context falls back to /sitecore/content instead.