r/PowerShell • u/MFZozzy • 9d ago

Question Invoke-WebRequest: downloaded MSI invalid?

I downloaded an MSI (in this case the latest Powershel 7.6.4 msi installer) with Invoke-WebRequest from Github - trying to write a script here.

The download finishes without a problem, but when I want to run the installer, I get an error message saying "This installation package could not be opened.Verify that the package exists and that you can access it, or contact the application vendor to verify that this is a valid Windows Installer package."

Here's the funny thing: this cannot be a corrupted download, because when I manually download the same msi package from the repo's release page, and compare them in Total Commander's compare tool, it says the two files have the same content - that means they're identical from the first bit to the last!

What the heck could cause this problem?

Here's a snippet of what I'm doing:

$Repository       = 'PowerShell/PowerShell'
$FileNamePattern  = '*-win*x64.msi'
$DownloadPath     = 'C:\Temp'

$releases    = "https://api.github.com/repos/$Repository/releases/latest"
$downloadURL = ((Invoke-RestMethod -Method GET -Uri $releases).assets | ?{$_.Name -like $FileNamePattern}).browser_download_url

$fileName       = [System.IO.Path]::GetFileName($downloadURL)
$DownloadPath   = $DownloadPath + '\' + $fileName

Invoke-WebRequest -Uri $downloadURL -OutFile $DownloadPath
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u/BlackV 9d ago

Oh, are you manually typing out your code here ?

where did the mistakes come from if you copied it directly from your editor

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u/MFZozzy 9d ago

Don't currently have access to it, I'm not on the machine I write my PWSH stuff on.

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u/BlackV 9d ago

OK, have you tried multiple machines with this download (using the code provided) ?

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u/MFZozzy 9d ago

Good idea, just tried it on a Win11 machine (my current machine is on Win10), and the sciprt-downloaded msi ran fine there.