Powershell BitsTransfer https basic authentication syntax

Question

I'm new to PowerShell scripting. I'm struggling with the MS documentation and finding few examples to work with.

I'm trying to automate the weekly download of a large txt file from ntis.gov with a BitsTransfer script. I'm using .ps1 script because apparently SSIS can't do this without writing .NET code.

Access to this text file is via https: with an NTIS issued username and password. How can I specify (hard code) the password into the authentication string? I know this is bad practice. Is there a better way to do this?

My script looks like this-

    $date= Get-Date -format yyMMdd
    Import-Module BitsTransfer
    $Job = Start-BitsTransfer `
    -DisplayName DMFweeklytrans `
    -ProxyUsage AutoDetect `
    -Source https://dmf.ntis.gov/dmldata/weekly/WA$date `
    -Destination D:\Test.txt `
    -Authentication Basic `
    -Credential "myIssuedUsername" `
    -Asynchronous

While (($Job.JobState -eq "Transferring") -or ($Job.JobState -eq "Connecting")) {sleep 5}
Switch($Job.JobState)
    {
        "Transfer Completed" {Complete-BitsTransfer -BitsJobs $Jobs}
        default {$Job | Format-List} 
    }

Dried

Answer 1

When you have to provide credentials in non-interactive mode, you can create a PSCredential object in the following way.

$secpasswd = ConvertTo-SecureString "PlainTextPassword" -AsPlainText -Force
$yourcreds = New-Object System.Management.Automation.PSCredential ("username", $secpasswd)

$Job = Start-BitsTransfer `
    -DisplayName DMFweeklytrans `
    -ProxyUsage AutoDetect `
    -Source https://dmf.ntis.gov/dmldata/weekly/WA$date `
    -Destination D:\Test.txt `
    -Authentication Basic `
    -Credential $yourcreds `
    -Asynchronous

Fribble

Is there any way to directly set headers? For example Azure Devops wants a token (PAT) set as the Authorization header. It's basically a base-64 encoded string but not <username>:<password>. – Spotlight

@Spotlight have you tried -CustomHeaders with something like : $MyPat = 'yourPAT' $B64Pat = [Convert]::ToBase64String([System.Text.Encoding]::UTF8.GetBytes(":$MyPat")) and "Authorization: Basic ${B64_PAT}" – Fribble