Creating PowerShell Web Server

by ps1Aug 11, 2016

All Versions

Here is an example that implements a simple web server with just a few lines of code. When you run this script, you can enter one of these URLs into any web browser on your machine:

http://localhost:8080/

http://localhost:8080/services

And here is the code:

# enter this URL to reach PowerShell’s web server
$url = 'http://localhost:8080/'

# HTML content for some URLs entered by the user
$htmlcontents = @{
  'GET /'  =  '<html><building>Here is PowerShell</building></html>'
  'GET /services'  =  Get-Service | ConvertTo-Html

}

# start web server
$listener = New-Object System.Net.HttpListener
$listener.Prefixes.Add($url)
$listener.Start()

try
{
  while ($listener.IsListening) {  
    # process received request
    $context = $listener.GetContext()
    $Request = $context.Request
    $Response = $context.Response

    $received = '{0} {1}' -f $Request.httpmethod, $Request.url.localpath
    
    # is there HTML content for this URL?
    $html = $htmlcontents[$received]
    if ($html -eq $null) {
      $Response.statuscode = 404
      $html = 'Oops, the page is not available!'
    } 
    
    # return the HTML to the caller
    $buffer = [Text.Encoding]::UTF8.GetBytes($html)
    $Response.ContentLength64 = $buffer.length
    $Response.OutputStream.Write($buffer, 0, $buffer.length)
    
    $Response.Close()
  }
}
finally
{
  $listener.Stop()
}

Please note that the listener runs in an endless loop. When you abort the script, it takes another web request from a web browser for PowerShell to return to you.

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Creating PowerShell Web Server

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