Last updated Jul 21, 2025

After responding to a post on BlueSky this morning, I realized that I have not yet written about methods of downloading files in PowerShell. We download things in a graphical user interface all the time, but sometimes you have the need to download a file as part of a script, automation, etc. Let’s have a quick look at some methods of downloading files in PowerShell. Let’s use the extended Alpine Linux ISO as our sample file to download.

The first method that post PowerShellers will discover is the fact that Invoke-WebRequest has a -OutFile parameter. If you’ve used curl -O before, this is not dissimilar from that behavior.

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# Note that the variable notes don't need to match the parameter names, even though I did as such here.
$uri = ""
$outFile = "$env:TEMP\"
Invoke-WebRequest -Uri $uri -OutFile $outFile

This will download the .zip archive to your user profile’s temp directory. While downloading, you’ll see a progress bar: ![]/content/published/media/invoke-webrequest-with-progress-bar.png

But how long did that take? Let’s find out by wrapping our script inside Measure-Command:

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Measure-Command -Expression {
  $uri = ""
  $outFile = "$env:TEMP\"
  Invoke-WebRequest -Uri $uri -OutFile $outFile
}

As you may have noticed, Invoke-WebRequest is somewhat slow by default. It’s more than sufficient for quickly downloading smaller items like configuration files and smaller compressed archives, but for larger files, it’s not so fast: ![]

If you don’t care about displaying the progress bar in the terminal, we can improve the performance by opting to not calculate and render it by changing your $ProgressPreference to “SilentlyContinue” instead of “Continue”, which is the default, and using the same download script: So what sort of performance improvement do we realize? Let’s use the same measurement method again:

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Measure-Command -Expression {
  # Change the ProgressPreference first
  $ProgressPreference = 'SilentlyContinue'

  $uri = ""
  $outFile = "$env:TEMP\"
  Invoke-WebRequest -Uri $uri -OutFile $outFile

  # I recommend setting this back to the default value when done, so you don't get caught off guard in the future when expecting the default progress bar/output 😁
  $ProgressPreference = 'Continue'    
}

We see a decent performnace uplift here, having saved around 5 minutes! ![]

Now if we really want to boost our performance when downloading files in PowerShell, we can make use of the [System.Net.WebClient] .NET class. PowerShell is build on .NET and can make use of such powerful classes. Let’s try measuring this one now:

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Measure-Command -Expression {
  $uri = ""
  $outFile = "$env:TEMP\"
  $webClient = New-Object -TypeName System.Net.WebClient
  $webClient.DownloadFile("$uri","$outFile")
}

Now we’re talking! Check out that performance uplift: ![]