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PowerShell 7.3 Invoke-WebRequest scenarios with 403 Forbidden when accessing certain URLs

👀 Views: 301 đŸ’Ŧ Answers: 1 📅 Created: 2025-06-05
powershell webrequest http 403 PowerShell

I'm stuck on something that should probably be simple. I've been banging my head against this for hours. I'm trying to use `Invoke-WebRequest` in PowerShell 7.3 to download a file from a specific URL, but I keep getting a `403 Forbidden` behavior. The URL I'm trying to access is `https://example.com/protected-resource`. I've confirmed that the URL is valid and that I can access it via a browser without any issues. It appears that the server may require specific headers to allow access, such as a User-Agent or a specific authentication token. I've tried the following basic command: ```powershell $response = Invoke-WebRequest -Uri 'https://example.com/protected-resource' ``` However, this results in the `403 Forbidden` behavior. When I check the `$response` object, it shows that the status code is indeed 403. To troubleshoot, I attempted to add a User-Agent header like so: ```powershell $response = Invoke-WebRequest -Uri 'https://example.com/protected-resource' -Headers @{ 'User-Agent' = 'Mozilla/5.0' } ``` Unfortunately, this still returns the same behavior. I've also considered that I might need to include additional authentication headers, but I'm not sure how to construct those in PowerShell. Does anyone have experience with handling similar issues in PowerShell? What specific headers should I include to avoid this 403 behavior, or is there another approach I should take? Any examples would be greatly appreciated. My development environment is Ubuntu. Thanks in advance!