Download single file from tfsvc with powershell

If you are working in a hybrid IT environment, you often need to download or upload files from or to the cloud in your PowerShell scripts.

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! With organizations moving more workloads into Azure, administrators now have more options for running PowerShell commands and scripts across Can you imagine how long it would take to generate a list of VMs across hundreds of subscriptions on With the Invoke-WebRequest cmdlet, we can provide the credentials that are needed for downloading the files. If you are creating a script that will need to run automatically, then you will need to store the credentials in the script itself.

I recommend creating a secure string password and store it in a text file on the computer that is running the script. This cmdlet allows you to queue files, set priority useful for bandwidth limitation , can run in the background and download multiple files asynchronous. This is the most basic method of downloading a file with BitsTransfer, you only need a source and destination. By default, the download jobs run in the foreground consuming the maximum bandwidth available.

You can change this by setting the priority of the job:. Another option is to run the download job asynchronous , allowing you to start multiple download jobs at the same time. As you can see I have downloaded the same bin file as before. But if we look in the destination folder we only see a.

To download multiple files with PowerShell we first need to know which files are available. We can use the Invoke-WebRequest cmdlet first to get the content from the webpage. This will return not only the content of the webpage but also other properties, like Links and InputFields.

We can filter the links with a simple like query and select only the href property from each link. So we now have the links for all random binary files. All we need to do is download each one of them. See Permissions and groups reference. Bypasses a gated check-in requirement.

For more information, see Check in to a folder that is controlled by a gated check-in build process. By default, the project collection is presumed to be the one that contains the workspace that maps the current directory. Forces a check-in on items with pending edits even when there are no content changes in the file. Specifies the scope of the items to check in from the user's workspace. You can specify more than one Itemspec argument.

For syntax, see Use Team Foundation version control commands. Specifies the user account to run the command. See Use Team Foundation version control commands. The selected state of each pending change as shown in the Check In dialog box , the comment, associated work items, check-in notes, and check-in policy override reason, are stored on your dev machine as pending changes until you check them in.

Specify this option to disable this default behavior. It works for locations 1 and 2, but not for location 3. I've tried it with multiple different Team Projects we have dozens of them and so far it has only worked in all 3 locations for the first one.

All others only work for locations 1 and 2, but not for location 3. And by "not work" I specifically mean that it produces the following PS log in the build definition:. So it is unable to find any items in history when run in location 3, even though it did find items and downloaded them successfully when run in locations 1 and 2. Any idea why this is happening?

Other important details to note: 1. I've meticulously checked several times now that the Team Project names are all spelled correctly. The Changeset Range is correct and does contain files to be downloaded within that range in all of the Team Projects I'm trying this for. Remember that I'm getting results and downloading the files successfully when I run the script in locations 1 and 2. I realize that this might be some weird bug with TFS and that upgrading to Azure might very well solve the problem.

I would love to upgrade, but unfortunately I'm in a workplace and there people that sit behind bigger desks than me that decide when the upgrade happens.