Activate Feature on All Sites in SharePoint using PowerShell

In some scenarios, you may have to activate a feature for all sites or site collections in SharePoint. In my case today, I had to activate "Open In Client" feature of SharePoint to disable browser based editing for all site collection in a SharePoint web application.

How to Activate a Feature in SharePoint?
To activate a site collection feature from SharePoint web UI, You can navigate to Site settings >> Site Collection Features >> Click on "Activate" next to the relevant feature.

Pretty straight forward and easy enough through the UI, isn't it? Well, If you have to do the same for a dozens of site collection in the web application, PowerShell is the perfect solution.

Activate feature for all site collections in SharePoint

Add-PSSnapin Microsoft.SharePoint.PowerShell -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue

#Configuration Parameters
$WebAppURL="https://portal.crescent.com/"
$FeatureName="OpenInClient" #Feature Folder Name

#Get all site collections of the web app and iterate through
$SiteColl= Get-SPSite -WebApplication $WebAppURL -Limit ALL
Foreach($Site in $SiteColl)
{ 
 #Get the Feature ID from Feature Name
    $Feature = Get-SPFeature -Site $Site.Url | Where {$_.DisplayName -eq $FeatureName}
 
 #If Feature Found
 if($Feature -ne $null)
    {
       #Check if the Feature is activated already
       if (Get-SPFeature -Site $Site.Url | Where {$_.ID -eq $Feature.Id})
       {
         Write-Host $FeatureName "is already activated at " $Site.Url -f Yellow
        }
       else
       {
       #Activate the Feature
       Enable-SPFeature –identity $Feature.ID -URL $Site.URL
       Write-Host "Feature Activated on "$site.URL -f Green   
  }
 }
 else
 {
      Write-Host "Feature Name doesn't exist:"$FeatureName -f Red
 } 
}

This PowerShell script activates feature on all site collections.

You can also use this one-liner to activate feature on all site collections: (No error handling, however!)

Get-SPSite -Limit All | foreach {Enable-SPFeature "0561d315-d5db-4736-929e-26da142812c5" -url $_.URL } 

SharePoint: activate feature on all sites
Consider a scenario, where you have to activate a site level (web) feature on 100's of sites under a site collection, which is quite common. In my case, I had to activate Nintex Workflow 2013 feature on all sub sites within a particular site collection.

Add-PSSnapin Microsoft.SharePoint.PowerShell -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue

#Configuration Parameters
$SiteCollURL="http://portal.crescent.com/"
$FeatureID="0561d315-d5db-4736-929e-26da142812c5" 

#Get the Feature
$Feature = Get-SPFeature | Where {$_.ID -eq $FeatureID}

#If Feature Found
if($Feature -ne $null)
{     
    #Get all sites under the collection and loop through
    $Site= Get-SPSite $SiteCollURL
    Foreach($Web in $Site.AllWebs)
    {
  #Check if the Feature is activated already
       if (Get-SPFeature -Web $web.Url | Where {$_.ID -eq $FeatureId})
       {
         Write-Host $FeatureID "is already activated at " $Web.Url -f "Blue"
        }
       else
       {
           #Activate the Feature
           Enable-SPFeature –identity $FeatureID -URL $Web.URL
           Write-Host "Feature has been Activated on "$Web.URL -f "Green"
       }
    }
}
else    
{
    Write-Host "Feature doesn't exist:"$FeatureID -f "Red"
}

This script activates feature for all sites in SharePoint.