Create full-screen “kiosk-mode” shortcuts to websites in Google Chrome using PowerShell

I was given a list of 200 or so webpages so I could create shortcuts. Not just any old shortcut, but they needed to contain an argument to tell the browser to open a URL in full-screen kiosk mode. This is so that the user cannot immediately exit the page; beneficial for controlled environments and public portals.

After creating- I don’t know- twelve shortcuts; I thought, there has to be an easy way to do this.
It wasn’t too bad, just.. cumbersome.

It could be scripted, I thought.

I made the determination that I could create a function which is looped for each entry in a CSV input file.

So, I’m creating a CSV file with the following structure:

name,url

For example:

Google,https://google.com
YouTube,https://youtube.com
GitHub,https://github.com

I’m calling this input.csv and I’ll put it in a new folder C:\script for example.

Then, I’ll open PowerShell ISE (or just plain ‘ol notepad) and save a new .ps1 file to my working directory C:\script

 

1. Define parameters:

$destination = 'F:\destination' ### where do you want the shortcuts to be created?
$chromeroot = 'C:\Program Files (x86)\Google\Chrome' ### since I am creating chrome shortcuts, I need the path to the install directory.
$workingdir = 'C:\script' ### I'm defining a working  directory -- This is where I keep the CSV and the PS1 files. I guess I don't need to define this...
$input = Import-Csv .\input.csv ### define the source CSV file which contains your data

 

2. Create a function that creates this specialized shortcut.

I’m calling this function “Create-Shortcut” for obvious reasons.

function Create-Shortcut
{
$Shell = New-Object -ComObject ("WScript.Shell")
$ShortCut = $Shell.CreateShortcut("$destination\$URLTitle.lnk")
$ShortCut.TargetPath="$chromeroot\Application\chrome.exe"
$ShortCut.Arguments="--kiosk $URL"
$ShortCut.WorkingDirectory = "$chromeroot\Application";
$ShortCut.WindowStyle = 1;
$ShortCut.IconLocation = "$chromeroot\Application\chrome.exe, 0";
$ShortCut.Description = "";
$ShortCut.Save()
}

A few notes:

• You can change the icon by defining an alternate path to an icon
• You can optionally tweak the script to add a description for each shortcut in Windows
• You don’t have to use the --kiosk argument!

2.5 Look into other chrome.exe arguments:

For example:

--no-referrers
--disable-background-mode
--incognito
--disable-plugins

 

3. Create a ForLoop

Here we are looking in the input.csv file for:

• the name
• the url

and we are running our function Create-Shortcut with the data parsed from the CSV.

ForEach ($item in $input){
$URLTitle = $($item.name)
$URL = $($item.url)
Create-Shortcut
}

 

That’s it!

Check your destination folder and look at all those pretty new shortcuts.

All together:

### Use this tool to import a CSV of URLs to full-screen chrome shortcuts
### Tyler Woods (2016)
### CSV headers: name,url
### example GitHub,https://github.com

$destination = 'F:\destination'
$chromeroot = 'C:\Program Files (x86)\Google\Chrome'
$workingdir = 'C:\script'
$input = Import-Csv .\input.csv

function Create-Shortcut
{
$Shell = New-Object -ComObject ("WScript.Shell")
$ShortCut = $Shell.CreateShortcut("$destination\$URLTitle.lnk")
$ShortCut.TargetPath="$chromeroot\Application\chrome.exe"
$ShortCut.Arguments="--kiosk $URL"
$ShortCut.WorkingDirectory = "$chromeroot\Application";
$ShortCut.WindowStyle = 1;
$ShortCut.IconLocation = "$chromeroot\Application\chrome.exe, 0";
$ShortCut.Description = "";
$ShortCut.Save()
}

ForEach ($item in $input){
    $URLTitle = $($item.name)
    $URL = $($item.url)
    Create-Shortcut
    }