Solutions from your farm

Extract all of the Solutions from your farm

(Get-SPFarm).Solutions | ForEach-Object{$var = (Get-Location).Path + "\" + $_.Name; $_.SolutionFile.SaveAs($var)}

Quickly let's see if we can break this down and explain the pieces.

Get-SPFarm does just that it gets your current farm. When I put it in the ( ) that returns the farm. Then I tack on .Solutions which returns all of the solutions in the farm. From there I pipe the solutions over to old faithful ForEach-Object. ForEach-Object says do everything within the { } to each solution passed from the pipe. Within the { } I use $var = to set the variable's value to Get-Location which returns the current location you are at in the file system. .Path returns that location. (Example output: c:\backupfolder) The + says continue to add to the $var variable. "\" adds a \ to the $var variable. Another + means keep adding to the variable. $_.Name says give me the name property of the current solution. So this ends up setting the value of $var to c:\backupfolder\mysolution.wsp assuming the solution filename was mysolution.wsp and we were running our PowerShell from the folder c:\backupfolder. Finally we have a ; which means we are all done with that line.

We follow up setting the variable with $_.SolutionFile.SaveAs($var). $_.SolutionFile is a property of the current solution. .SaveAs is a method for saving that file. That method needs to know what filename to save the solution to. We give it $var which is the variable we just created.

Boom! Just like that you have exported all of the solutions from your farm to a handy, dandy folder.

Import all of the Solution into another farm

Now because I am naturally lazy I said "I bet we can figure out how to script importing all of those to our farm." After a little playing turns out you can with the following PowerShell.

Get-ChildItem | ForEach-Object{Add-SPSolution -LiteralPath $_.Fullname}

So how does that work? Get-ChildItem returns all of the files in a folder so if you navigate to the folder you copied over all of the solutions to you return them all. For this example we will say we are in the folder c:\copiedfolder. We then pipe those files over to ForEach-Object so we can do everything within the { } to each object. Add-SPSolution is a SharePoint cmdlet for adding solutions to a farm. –LiteralPath is a required parameter where you need to provide the path to the solution to import. $_.Fullname returns the .fullname property of the object. So in this case it returns c:\copiedfolder\mysolution.wsp.

Oh yeah! Just like that all 25 of those solutions are added to our farm.

Deploy all of those Solutions

So we got this far without me having to type in a bunch of crap so surely we can automate this part also. <he he he> (Keep in mind when I explain the developer crap below it might not be 100% perfect but you get the idea.)

Get-SPSolution | ForEach-Object {If ($_.ContainsWebApplicationResource -eq $False) {Install-SPSolution -Identity $_ -GACDeployment} else {Install-SPSolution -Identity $_ -AllWebApplications -GACDeployment}}

Get-SPSolution is pretty easy that returns all of the solutions in the farm. As a side note there are a lot of properties you can play with here. So you could for example find out which ones are already deployed, in our case we didn't have any solutions so we didn't mess with it. ForEach-Object is going to run all of the cmdlets within the { } on each solution. The If cmdlet allows us to evaluate the contents of ( ) if it is true we do the next set of { } if it is false then it will process the { } after the else statement. $_.ContainsWebApplicationResoruces is a true or false property of a solution. –eq checks if the property is equal to $False. $False is a PowerShell system variable that represents false. So this statement checks to see if the solution has web application resources because if it does we need to install the solution a different way. For the solutions that don't have web resources ($false) we run {Install-SPSolution -Identity $_ -GACDeployment} which is the SharePoint PowerShell cmdlet for deploying a global solution. For the solutions that do have web application resources we run {Install-SPSolution -Identity $_ -AllWebApplications -GACDeployment} which just tells SharePoint to deploy those resources to all of the web applications in our farm. I am guessing you don't necessarily have to deploy them all to the GAC (-GACDeployment) but this is the way my customer wanted it so I said ok.

When you run the command you should just be returned to the prompt. You can then go to Central Admin > System Settings > Manage farm solutions. Here you will see your solutions and their current status. If you deploy a lot at once it can take 10 minutes or more for them all to go from deploying to deployed but they will. Just be patient.

Hopefully now you feel equipped to go play. Remember the idea here is for you to learn about the moving pieces. Yes my scripts work as is but I am guessing you can take these and massage them to be much cooler. I am just a PowerShell hack who figures out the first solution that works instead of always figuring out how I can refine it to the most efficient, coolest thing ever. J Though I do think I had it worked out to do the import and deploy in one string of commands but we had to return to real work before we finished that part.