PowerShell How-To

Installing a Module from the PowerShell Gallery

• By Adam Bertram
• 10/11/2018

For the longest time, the open source community had a ubiquitous concept called "public package repositories." Using utilities such as rpm, yum et al. is commonplace, but Microsoft never had the same -- until the PowerShell Gallery.

The PowerShell Gallery was introduced to be a repository of packages from PowerShell modules and software packages where the community could share packages with one another. Using the built-in PowerShellGet module, anyone using PowerShell can upload, discover and download all kinds of packages.

Let's see how we can use the PowerShell Gallery to install a module.

First, we need to figure out what module we're looking for. Using the Find-Module command, we can search the gallery's repository of modules using wildcards. Perhaps I'm looking for a module around Active Directory. I can use Find-Module -Name *activedirectory* to discover all of the modules available.

PS> Find-Module *activedirectory*

Version    Name                                Repository           Description
-------    ----                                ----------           -----------
2.18.0.0   xActiveDirectory                    PSGallery            The xActiveDirectory module is originally part of the Windows PowerShell D...
2.0.0.1513 Microsoft.Azure.ActiveDirectory.... PSGallery            This module provides cmdlets to perform Azure AD Privileged Identity Manag...
2.0.0.9    ActiveDirectoryTools                PSGallery            Custom tools for automating Active Directory management and setup. I've pu...
1.6.0      CPolydorou.ActiveDirectory          PSGallery            Active Directory Helper Functions
1.0.0.9    ActiveDirectoryStig                 PSGallery            Contains functions to set Active Directory STIG requirements that are not ...
1.1.1      cActiveDirectory                    PSGallery            Module with DSC Resources for Active Directory
17.0.66... ActiveDirectoryCmdlets              PSGallery            CData Cmdlets for Active Directory
1.1.4      POSHOrigin_ActiveDirectoryDNS       PSGallery            POSHOrigin_ActiveDirectoryDNS is a set of PowerShell 5 based DSC resources...
1.0.0      ActiveDirectoryFever                PSGallery            PowerShell Module with additional custom functions and cmdlets for Windows...
1.1.0.0    myActiveDirectory                   PSGallery            This module allows creation (deletion not currently covered) of Active Dir...
0.0.5.1    SUBnet192.ActiveDirectory           PSGallery            PowerShell module for Active Directory Custom Tasks

Once I've found the module I'm looking for, I can run Install-Module, which would both download and install the module, or I can simply pipe the modules found from Find-Module directly to Install-Module.

Perhaps I want to install the DSC module xActiveDirectory from the gallery. I need to limit the results that Find-Module returns by only specifying the name of the single module. This will only return the xActiveDirectory module.

Once I do that, I can then pipe that directly to Install-Module.

PS> Find-Module -Name xActiveDirectory | Install-Module

Untrusted repository
You are installing the modules from an untrusted repository. If you trust this repository, change its InstallationPolicy value by running the
Set-PSRepository cmdlet. Are you sure you want to install the modules from 'https://www.powershellgallery.com/api/v2/'?
[Y] Yes  [A] Yes to All  [N] No  [L] No to All  [S] Suspend  [?] Help (default is "N"): a
PS> Get-Module xActiveDirectory

ModuleType Version    Name                                ExportedCommands
---------- -------    ----                                ----------------
Manifest   2.18.0.0   xActiveDirectory

You can see above that when I run Install-Module, it asks me if I trust the source or not. This is the default behavior. You can override this by changing the installation policy as the message suggests, or by using the Force parameter.

This method can be used to install any module from the PowerShell Gallery or, if you already know the name of the module, you can call Install-Module directly and use the Name parameter using Install-Module -Name xActiveDirectory.