Problem installing web part using Powershell

Question

We've developed a custom Visual Web Part using Visual Studio 2010 for Sharepoint 2010 Server.

The webpart gets deployed when executed from VS (F5), so we can add it wherever we want using Sharepoint Designer for example.

But we need to use a more automated way for deployment, so I found it can be done using Powershell.

So the steps we did was the following:

1. In Vistual Studio 2010: Build > Package to generate the .wsp
2. Copied the .wsp to the /bin directory inside the Sharepoint website IIS dir (C:\inetpub\wwwroot\wss\VirtualDirectories\31953\bin in this case, because is running on port 31953)
3. In Sharepoint 2010 Management Shell executed the following commands:

Add-SPSolution -LiteralPath "C:\inetpub\wwwroot\wss\VirtualDirectories\31953\bin\OutContext.wsp"

Install-SPSolution -Identity OutContext.wsp -WebApplication http://servername:31953 -GACDeployment

Then opened the site in Sharepoint Designer, try to find the webpart inside Insert > Webpart menu (under Custom category) but I couldn't find anything.

Any idea what I'm doing wrong?

Answer 1

I think you still need to activate the feature that deploys your webpart. As far as I can see you have installed the solution and thereby installed the feature but not activated the feature that contains your webpart.

So add the line enable-spfeature -identity foobarwebpartfeature -url yourwebsite in your script to ensure that the feature is activated.