How do I check if a site already exists from PowerShell?

Question

I have a script that exports a site and restores it in another web application. I want to check if the target site already exists. Is there an easy way to tell if www.example.org/sites/asite/ is free, without throwing an error in Powershell?

score 30 · Accepted Answer · answered May 16 '11 at 05:50

30

Using Powershell's ErrorAction you can suppress the error if a web does not exist.

$exists = (Get-SPWeb $url -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue) -ne $null

answered May 16 '11 at 05:50

Steve P

2,358
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Alexey Krasheninnikov · Answer 2 · 2011-05-17T10:01:07.163

8

SharePoint 2010:

Get-SPWeb -Identity $url | Select-Object -Property Exists -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue

SharePoint 2007:

[void][reflection.assembly]::loadwithpartialname("Microsoft.SharePoint")
$siteCollection = New-Object Microsoft.SharePoint.SPSite($url)
$site = $siteCollection.OpenWeb()
Write-Host $site.Exists
...
$site.Dispose()
$siteCollection.Dispose()

edited May 17 '11 at 10:01

answered May 16 '11 at 03:50

Alexey Krasheninnikov

2,750
2
24
42

+1, good answer :) – Abe Miessler May 16 '11 at 04:43
This throws an error still:
Get-SPWeb -Identity 'http://example.org' | Select-Object -Property Exists

The 2007 version doesn't throw errors but returns true for sites that don't exist.
– Dan May 16 '11 at 06:28
Do you prefix the url with protocol moniker such as http://? It is obligatory I believe. – Alexey Krasheninnikov May 17 '11 at 09:58
Get-SPWeb : Cannot find an SPSite object that contains the following Id or Url: example.org. -- this is what you get in case that web never existed – Alexey Krasheninnikov May 17 '11 at 10:00
You can either swallow the error by using -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue or handle it using trap, try/catch or 2>&1. Read on PowerShell error handling elsewhere. – Alexey Krasheninnikov May 17 '11 at 10:04

How do I check if a site already exists from PowerShell?

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