How to Deploy or Remove a Solution Package Using PowerShell Commands

SharePoint 2010 introduced many new features to improve user experience. One such feature is the SharePoint 2010 Management Shell, a plug-in for Windows PowerShell which contains more than 500 commands for SharePoint administrative work. It does the same job as STSADM commands, but is much more powerful. In this first post about SharePoint 2010 PowerShell, we will take a brief look at deploying and removing a solution package.

Challenge:

How can I deploy/remove a solution package in SharePoint 2010 using PowerShell commands?

 

Solution:

In order to deploy/remove a solution package using PowerShell commands, you must first verify that you possess the following permissions:

• SharePoint Farm Administrator.
• Local Server Administrator on all Web servers.
• db_owner permission on the content database.

Deploy a solution:

Step 1: Open SharePoint 2010 Management Shell

From the Start menu, select All Programs > Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Products > SharePoint 2010 Management Shell.

 

Step 2: Add solution to the SharePoint Solutions Store. In this example, we will use the Bamboo Calendar Plus solution.

Add-SPSolution -LiteralPath <SolutionPath>

Step 3: Deploy solution.

Install-SPSolution -Identity <SolutionName> -WebApplication <URLName> [-GACDeployment] [-CASPolicies]

Where:

• GACDeployment is the parameter that enables SharePoint 2010 to deploy the assemblies in the global assembly cache.
• CASPolicies enables the creation of a custom code access security (CAS) policy file and the activation of it in the Web.config file of the targeted site collection.

These two parameters are required in order to deploy this specific solution.

 

Step 4: You can check whether your solution has installed successfully by using the following command.

Get-SPSolution <SolutionName>

 

Remove a solution

Step 1: Retract solution.

Uninstall-SPSolution -Identity <SolutionName> -WebApplication <URLName>

 

Step 2: Remove solution from farm.

Remove-SPSolution -Identity <SolutionName>

               

Notes:

This method works with both SharePoint 2010 Foundation and Server.