Is there any way to monitor the progress of a download using a WebClient object in powershell?

Question

I'm downloading a file using a simple line like this:

$webclient = New-Object -TypeName System.Net.WebClient
$webclient.DownloadFile("https://www.example.com/file", "C:/Local/Path/file")

The problem is that I want to display a message to the user while this is downloading using a pop up window, or using a progress bar in the shell. Is it possible to make a pop up box that disappears when the download completes, or a progress bar that monitors the progress of the download?

Answer 1

To display a progress bar for downloading files check out Jason Niver's Blog post:

Downloading files from the internet in Power Shell (with progress)

Basically you can create a function that still use's the web client functionality but includes a way to capture the status. You can then display the status to the user using the Write-Progress Power shell functionality.

function DownloadFile($url, $targetFile)

{

   $uri = New-Object "System.Uri" "$url"

   $request = [System.Net.HttpWebRequest]::Create($uri)

   $request.set_Timeout(15000) #15 second timeout

   $response = $request.GetResponse()

   $totalLength = [System.Math]::Floor($response.get_ContentLength()/1024)

   $responseStream = $response.GetResponseStream()

   $targetStream = New-Object -TypeName System.IO.FileStream -ArgumentList $targetFile, Create

   $buffer = new-object byte[] 10KB

   $count = $responseStream.Read($buffer,0,$buffer.length)

   $downloadedBytes = $count

   while ($count -gt 0)

   {

       $targetStream.Write($buffer, 0, $count)

       $count = $responseStream.Read($buffer,0,$buffer.length)

       $downloadedBytes = $downloadedBytes + $count

       Write-Progress -activity "Downloading file '$($url.split('/') | Select -Last 1)'" -status "Downloaded ($([System.Math]::Floor($downloadedBytes/1024))K of $($totalLength)K): " -PercentComplete ((([System.Math]::Floor($downloadedBytes/1024)) / $totalLength)  * 100)

   }

   Write-Progress -activity "Finished downloading file '$($url.split('/') | Select -Last 1)'"

   $targetStream.Flush()

   $targetStream.Close()

   $targetStream.Dispose()

   $responseStream.Dispose()

}

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Then you would just call the function:

downloadFile "http://example.com/largefile.zip" "c:\temp\largefile.zip"

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Also, here are some other Write-Progress examples from docs.microsoft for powrshell 7.

Write-Progress