Powershell Upload Multiple Files to SharePoint

SharePoint document library enables us to manage documents. In some cases, we need to upload multiple files to that library.  A common approach to automate this process is to integrate via the SharePoint Restful APIs. In this article, we take a look at using PowerShell to create a script that can quickly enable this integration without having the need to know all the details of the API.

Solution

For our use case, we have a drop location where our files are located. We need to read all the files and upload them to a SharePoint document library.

Note: We can run this snippet using Visual Studio Code. Just save the file with an extension of ps1, and VS Code will guide you on installing the PowerShell extensions.

# include the web cmdlets

Add-PSSnapin microsoft.sharepoint.powershell

# name:  uploadFiles

# purpose: upload multiple files from a shared location

#

function uploadFiles($path, $siteUrl)

{

try {

  # gets all the files (-File) in the directory

  $files = Get-ChildItem -Path $path –File

  #iterate thru each file

  foreach($file in $files) 

  { 

      $url = $siteUrl + $file

      $filePath = $path + $file

      #upload the file to the server using default credentials from the

      #current session

      $result = Invoke-WebRequest -Uri $url -InFile $filePath -Method PUT

               -UseDefaultCredentials

      #if the request status code is successful, we delete the files

      #else write an error message

      if($result.statuscode -eq 200){       

        Remove-Item $filePath -Force

      }else{

        write-host "Failed to upload" $filePath $result.statuscode

      }

  }

}

catch {

  write-host "Exception was raised: $PSItem" #psitem is the error object

}

}

#usage

#uploadFiles parm0 param1

#param[0] shared-location 

#param[1] sharepoint document library url

#

UploadFiles "\\some-document-path" "https://ozkary.com/shared-docs/"

CodeProject

In this snippet, we first need to include the snap-in for SharePoint. This loads the web cmdlets that provide the implementation abstraction to the SharePoint APIs.

The uploadFiles function enables us to read a folder location and lists only the files. We then iterate thru each file and use the Invoke-WebRequest to load them to a particular SharePoint document library. If the response has Status 200, we know that the upload was a success, and we remove the file. Otherwise, we write to the standard output using write-host.

Security

We should notice that when uploading the files, we use the -DefaultCredentials parameter.  This enables our script to pass the current session credentials to the request.  The credentials are set when the script is executed under the context of a particular service account that has access to the SharePoint document library.

 I hope this provides a quick automated way to upload files to your document libraries.

Originally published by ozkary.com