Powershell DownloadFile(,) command giving 403 - Forbidden error

Question

I am using Powershell DownloadFile(,) command for reading a .csv file from a document library in SharePoint 2013 site. When i ran the code on my DEV environment, it ran properly. The DEV environment is using http://. But , when I run this code on TEST environment i get 403 Forbidden error. The site(TEST environment) is running over https://.

I am using below code ,

$FilePath = "https://ServerName/sites/SiteName/MyDocumentLibrary/MyCSVFile.csv"
$localPath = "C:\temp\test.csv" 
$wc = New-Object System.Net.Webclient
$wc.DownloadFile($FilePath, $localPath)
$list = Import-Csv $localPath

The error says,

Exception calling "DownloadFile" with "2" argument(s): "The remote server returned an error: (403) Forbidden." At D:\Amit\UpdateUserInformationList.ps1:39 char:1

I have gone through various articles which talks about passing credentials with the Webclient($wc) object. But, with no luck. Still getting same error.

I am still unaware, when/why does Powershell throws this error ? What is the root cause of this error?

Any help will be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

After a long day, it turned out that for successfully using the Powershell DownloadFile() method, in my environment (SP2013 with ADFS) following two lines did the trick(at least for me).

$wc.UseDefaultCredentials = $true
$wc.Headers.Add("X-FORMS_BASED_AUTH_ACCEPTED", "f")

So, the final code looks like,

$FilePath = "https://ServerName/sites/SiteName/MyDocumentLibrary/MyCSVFile.csv"
$localPath = "C:\temp\test.csv" #Make sure the folder do exist
$wc = New-Object System.Net.Webclient
$wc.UseDefaultCredentials = $true
$wc.Headers.Add("X-FORMS_BASED_AUTH_ACCEPTED", "f")
$wc.DownloadFile($FilePath, $localPath)
$list = Import-Csv $localPath

I got help from the last comment(which is not marked as answer for that question :-)) of this post.

Answer 2

Try this

$wc = New-Object System.Net.WebClient
$wc.Credentials = New-Object System.Net.Networkcredential(Username, Password, Domain)

$UserAgent = "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.2; .NET CLR 1.0.3705;)"
$wc.Headers.Add([System.Net.HttpRequestHeader]::UserAgent, $UserAgent);