When using windows PowerShell as REST client, you may encounter certificate invalid issues for various reasons. The most likely reason should be a self-signed certificate or a invalid common name certificate or sometimes not adding SAN names in the certificates. This may cause your script to break if it relies on fetching data from remote server when communicating on HTTPS.

To avoid SSL Certificate trust issues if using HTTPS, we can use below PowerShell function to help: Continue reading “Ignore self-signed certificates in PowerShell” →

In one of previous blog post, we discussed how to work with using REST APIs in PowerShell. In this blog post, we’ll discuss how to use POST method in REST API.

POST involve sending both a body and headers.

  $person = @{
      first='joe'
      lastname='doe'
   }
   $body = (ConvertTo-Json $person)
   $hdrs = @{}
   $hdrs.Add("X-API-KEY","???")
   $hdrs.Add("X-SIGNATURE","234j123l4kl23j41l23k4j")
   $hdrs.Add("X-DATE","12/29/2016")
   Invoke-RestMethod -Uri $url -Method Post -Body $body -ContentType 'application/json' -Headers $hdrs
   ConvertTo-Json

The above on several lines is easier to read than one long line: Continue reading “Using POST method in REST API in PowerShell” →

The PowerShell command Copy-Item will overwrite a file if it exists by default. This is unless that file is marked Read Only in which case you can use the -Force switch to overwrite the file.

What if you want to only copy the file if it doesn’t exist? Here’s a quick PowerShell script that will complete this task:

$sourceFile = 'c:\temp\something.txt'
$destinationFile = 'c:\temp\1\something.txt'
if (-not (test-path $destinationFile))
{
  $opts = @{'path' = $sourceFile; 'destination' = $destinationFile; 'confirm' = $false}
  copy-item @opts
}
else
{
   $opts = @{'path' = $sourceFile; 'destination' = $destinationFile; 'confirm' = $true}
   copy-item @opts
}