PowerShell Script to upload an entire folder to FTP

Question

I'm working on a PowerShell script to upload the contents of an entire folder to an FTP location. I'm pretty new to PowerShell with only an hour or two of experience. I can get one file to upload fine but can't find a good solution to do it for all files in the folder. I'm assuming a foreach loop, but maybe there's a better option?

$source = "c:\test"
$destination = "ftp://localhost:21/New Directory/"
$username = "test"
$password = "test"
# $cred = Get-Credential
$wc = New-Object System.Net.WebClient
$wc.Credentials = New-Object System.Net.NetworkCredential($username, $password)

$files = get-childitem $source -recurse -force
foreach ($file in $files)
{
    $localfile = $file.fullname
    # ??????????
}
$wc.UploadFile($destination, $source)
$wc.Dispose()

Answer 1

The loop (or even better a recursion) is the only way to do this natively in PowerShell (or .NET in general).

$source = "c:\source"
$destination = "ftp://username:[email protected]/destination"

$webclient = New-Object -TypeName System.Net.WebClient

$files = Get-ChildItem $source

foreach ($file in $files)
{
    Write-Host "Uploading $file"
    $webclient.UploadFile("$destination/$file", $file.FullName)
} 

$webclient.Dispose()

Note that the above code does not recurse into subdirectories.

---

If you need a simpler solution, you have to use a 3rd party library.

For example with WinSCP .NET assembly:

Add-Type -Path "WinSCPnet.dll"
$sessionOptions = New-Object WinSCP.SessionOptions
$sessionOptions.ParseUrl("ftp://username:[email protected]/")

$session = New-Object WinSCP.Session
$session.Open($sessionOptions)

$session.PutFiles("c:\source\*", "/destination/").Check()

$session.Dispose()

The above code does recurse.

See https://winscp.net/eng/docs/library_session_putfiles

(I'm the author of WinSCP)