Powershell cant download file from my web server

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Learn more. Asked 9 years, 4 months ago. Active 7 years ago. Viewed 33k times. Improve this question. I don't think this will be supported by your web server. Add a comment. If you only use Windows servers that communicate through the Server Message Block SMB protocol, you can simply use the Copy-Item cmdlet to copy the file from a network share:. This assumes that you have a VPN solution in place so that your cloud network virtually belongs to your intranet.

Things get a bit more complicated if we are leaving the intranet and have to download from an extranet or the Internet. The next simple case is where you have to download a file from the web or from an FTP server. In PowerShell 2, you had to use the New-Object cmdlet for this purpose:. This is perhaps an understatement; Invoke-WebRequest is more powerful than wget because it allows you to not only download files but also parse them.

But this is a topic for another post. In the example, we just download the HTML page that the web server at www. Note that, if you only specify the folder without the file name, as you can do with Copy-Item , PowerShell will error:. If you omit the local path to the folder, Invoke-WebRequest will just use your current folder. The -Outfile parameter is always required if you want to save the file. The reason is that, by default, Invoke-WebRequest sends the downloaded file to the pipeline.

However, the pipeline will then not just contain the contents of the file. Instead, you will find an object with a variety of properties and methods that allow you to analyze text files. To only read the contents of the text file, we need to read the Content property of the object in the pipeline:. This command does the same thing as the previous one. If you want to have the file in the pipeline and store it locally, you have to use -PassThru parameter:.

Note that, if you omit the -Credential parameter, PowerShell will not prompt you for a user name and password and will throw this error:. You have to at least pass the user name with the -Credential parameter.

PowerShell will then ask for the password. If you want to avoid a dialog window in your script, you can store the credentials in a PSCredential object:. You can use the -UseDefaultCredentials parameter instead of the -Credential parameter if you want to use the credentials of the current user. To add a little extra security, you might want to encrypt the password.

If the web server uses basic authentication, your password will be transmitted in clear text if you download via HTTP. Note that this method only works if the web server manages authentication. Nowadays, most websites use the features of a content management system CMS to authenticate users. Usually, you then have to fill out an HTML form.

I will explain in one of my next posts how you can do this with Invoke-WebRequest. However, third-party PowerShell modules exist that step into the breach. Join the 4sysops PowerShell group! Your question was not answered? Ask in the forum! When we need to monitor Azure activities, we use Azure Activity Logs.

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With PowerShell, you can filter them by search The next section talks about using the HttpClient class in PowerShell to download files from the web. Like the WebClient class, you need to create first the System.

Refer to the comments above each line to know what each line of code does. In situations where downloading a file requires authentication, you need to add the credential to the HttpClient object. To include a credential to the file download request, create a new System. HttpClientHandler object to store the credentials. You can copy the code below and run it in PowerShell to test. Or you can also run it as a PowerShell script. In this example, the code is saved as download-file. At the start, the directory only has the script file in it.

Then, the script proceeds to download the file. After downloading the file, you can see that the new file is now inside the destination directory. Whether downloading password-protected sources, single or multiple files — a PowerShell way is available to you. This means that these methods apply to both Windows and Non-Windows systems, with the exclusion of Start-BitsTransfer.

And since PowerShell is more than a command prompt, you can translate what you learned into scripts. For you, that would mean an opportunity for automation. No more copying URLs, clicking links, and waiting for downloads manually.

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Adam the Automator. Twitter Facebook LinkedIn. Table of Contents. Downloading a file using Invoke-WebRequest. Downloading failed due to unauthorized access.

Downloading a file with authentication. Downloading a file using Start-BitsTransfer. Starting a synchronous multiple file download. Starting file download as background jobs. Viewing the file download job status. Downloading a file using the. NET HttpClient class. Subscribe to Adam the Automator for updates:.