install-module MSOnline | Jaap Wesselius

When installing the MSOnline module using the Install-Module MSOnline command in PowerShell it fails with a cryptic error like:

WARNING: Unable to download from URI ‘https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=627338&clcid=0x409’ to ”.
WARNING: Unable to download the list of available providers. Check your internet connection.
PackageManagement\Install-PackageProvider : No match was found for the specified search criteria for the provider ‘NuGet’. The package provider requires ‘PackageManagement’ and ‘Provider’ tags. Please check if the specified package has the tags.

And

WARNING: Unable to download from URI ‘https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=627338&clcid=0x409’ to ”.
WARNING: Unable to download the list of available providers. Check your internet connection.
PackageManagement\Get-PackageProvider : Unable to find package provider ‘NuGet’. It may not be imported yet. Try ‘Get-PackageProvider -ListAvailable’.
Install-Module : NuGet provider is required to interact with NuGet-based repositories. Please ensure that ‘2.8.5.201’ or newer version of NuGet provider is installed.

As shown in the following screenshot:

Install-PackageProvider

It turns out that this is a TLS issue, PowerShell does not use TLS 1.2 by default, while Microsoft requires TLS 1.2 from clients. To set TLS 1.2 usage for PowerShell, you can use the following command:

[Net.ServicePointManager]::SecurityProtocol = [Net.SecurityProtocolType]::Tls12

Now if you try again, it will install the MSOnline module:

Install-Module MSOnline

This is a per session setting, if you want to enable it for all sessions, add the previous command to the Microsoft.PowerShell_profile.ps1 and Microsoft.PowerShellISE_profile.ps1 profiles (use Notepad $Profile for this.