List all SharePoint Solutions, their Features and where they're Activated [A PowerShell Journey]

I recently inherited a farm with a lot of deployed customisations and no source code or documentation for any of it. In my experience this happens all to often and trying to work out what's been deployed and where can be very laborious indeed. Enter PowerShell!

Get a list of all solutions, then just the deployed solutions.

That's a start but: Where were they deployed? Do they contain features? If so, what is their scope and where are they activated?

Thanks to Google I found a great piece of scripting by Régis Boussion on TechNet which really got me moving. [cf. How to get all site features and custom features from sharepoint sitecollection?]

What this returns is a list of EVERY Feature in the farm, grouped by its Solution. I have modified this to filter the output to only deployed solutions.

So now I have a list of deployed solutions and the count, name and scope of each feature it contains. But I want to know more.

Features - Scope, Activation, Location

The code below iterates through every web app, every site and every web so use it with caution. The end result returns output for each solution: solution name, its features and scope, and the URLs where it's activated. I say activated because that's what's returned by the Features property. And for my purpose I was only interested in activated features.

my.sharepoint.webparts.solution.wsp (2)
my.sharepoint.webparts Some Web Part (Web)
 > http://url
 > http://url/subsite
my.sharepoint.webparts Another Web Part (Site)
 > http://url

And the code:

I was hoping to take this one step further by drilling into the feature object to list any associated web parts, lists and so on but sadly this isn't possible.

In my next post I'll be dealing with locating web part usage and list instances for these active features.