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PowerShell provides two cmdlets for accessing websites and web services: Invoke-RestMethod and Invoke-WebRequest. Let's discover how they work.
They appear to function similarly and support identical parameters:
$url = 'https://devblogs.microsoft.com/powershell/'
$result1 = Invoke-WebRequest -Uri $url -UseBasicParsing -TimeoutSec 1
$result2 = Invoke-RestMethod -Uri $url -UseBasicParsing -TimeoutSec 1 And thats trueat least in the initial stage: both cmdlets contact the web server and retrieve information.
- The more basic Invoke-WebRequest returns the raw response, including all connection details
- Invoke-RestMethod processes the response and focuses on the data. It examines the content type (e.g., text, JSON, XML) and attempts to automatically convert the data, returning ready-to-use objects.
NOTE: The -UseBasicParsing parameter and PowerShell 7
In Windows PowerShell, the -UseBasicParsing parameter forces the use of a built-in parser instead of relying on Internet Explorer's parsing capabilities. Since Internet Explorer is deprecated and absent from non-Windows operating systems, you should always use this parameter in Windows PowerShell.
In PowerShell 7, the -UseBasicParsing parameter has been deprecated. All web requests now use basic parsing by default. This parameter remains for backward compatibility but has no effect on the cmdlets operation.
Both cmdlets work well in Windows PowerShell, but numerous additions and improvements have been made in PowerShell 7.
One of these useful enhancements: if the web service or server you are accessing returns an error, it was originally always emitted and could not be suppressed or handled. Here is a test website that returns a 404 Not Found error:
Invoke-RestMethod https://example.org/NoSuchPageExists -ErrorAction Ignore PowerShell 7 has resolved this issuealong with many othersand introduced the -SkipHttpErrorCheck switch parameter, which suppresses exceptions at the web client level.
Invoke-RestMethod https://example.org/NoSuchPageExists -SkipHttpErrorCheck Differences
With Invoke-WebRequest, you can examine the server connection and, for example, view the original response code:
PS C:\> $result1 | Select-Object -Property StatusCode, StatusDescription
StatusCode StatusDescription
---------- -----------------
200 OKYou can also retrieve detailed information about the underlying connection, such as the location of the delivering server or whether the content was served from a cache:
PS C:\> $result1.BaseResponse
IsMutuallyAuthenticated : False
Cookies : {}
Headers : {Access-Control-Allow-Origin, Access-Control-Allow-Methods, Access-Control-Allow-Headers, Link...}
SupportsHeaders : True
ContentLength : -1
ContentEncoding :
ContentType : text/html; charset=UTF-8
CharacterSet : UTF-8
Server : nginx
LastModified : 31.01.2025 08:02:16
StatusCode : OK
StatusDescription : OK
ProtocolVersion : 1.1
ResponseUri : https://devblogs.microsoft.com/powershell/
Method : GET
IsFromCache : FalseAll HTTP headers remain visible and can be inspected, including cookies if any were sent:
PS C:\> $result1.Headers
Key Value
--- -----
Access-Control-Allow-Origin https://dev.quantum.microsoft.com
Access-Control-Allow-Methods GET, POST, OPTIONS
Access-Control-Allow-Headers Content-Type, Authorization
Link ; rel="https://api.w.org/"
X-Cacheable bot
X-Cache-Group bot
X-XSS-Protection 1; mode=block,1; mode=block
Transfer-Encoding chunked
Connection keep-alive,Transfer-Encoding
Feature-Policy geolocation 'none'; midi 'none'; sync-xhr 'none'; microphone 'none'; camera 'none'; magnetometer 'none'; gyr...
Referrer-Policy no-referrer-when-downgrade
X-Content-Type-Options nosniff
X-Frame-Options SAMEORIGIN
Content-Security-Policy script-src 'self' 'unsafe-inline' 'unsafe-eval' https:
Strict-Transport-Security max-age=15768000 ; includeSubDomains ; preload
Cache-Control must-revalidate, max-age=10800
Content-Type text/html; charset=UTF-8
Date Fri, 31 Jan 2025 08:44:57 GMT
Server nginx
X-Powered-By WP EngineIf you need the actual data content, you receive only the raw content and must convert it into an object format yourself:
PS C:\> $result1.Content($result1.RawContent returns the complete raw response including HTTP headers)
When Content Is Your Priority
Invoke-RestMethod, on the other hand, focuses on the content rather than the underlying connection. It immediately returns the processed content, with no need to specify additional properties.
PS C:\> $result2In this simple example, the content was HTML, so the content type was "string," and both cmdlets returned the same content. This changes when you work with actual web services that deliver structured content types, such as JSON or XML, which we will explore in the second part of this series.
Conclusions
For now, you know that Invoke-WebRequest and Invoke-RestMethod both perform the same basic function. However, Invoke-RestMethod goes a step further by processing the data, while Invoke-WebRequest allows you to view the underlying connection details.
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