How to create active directory groups with powershell

Create Active Directory Security Groups with PowerShell

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In this guide, you will learn you how to create single and bulk Active Directory security groups with PowerShell. I will provide examples and a script for creating bulk groups from a CSV file.

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Create AD Group with PowerShell

The New-ADGroup cmdelet is the command used to create Active Directory groups.

I won’t cover all of the details of this cmdlet instead, I’ll jump right into some examples. You can reference the Microsoft document New-ADGroup for the complete syntax.

Name and GroupScope are the two required parameters, everything is optional.

Example 1: Create a single AD group

New-ADGroup -Name Marketing_local -GroupCategory Security

This command creates a group named “Marketing_local the group category is security.

Example 2: Create a single group with a description

New-ADGroup -Name Account_Printers -GroupScope DomainLocal -Description "Group for permissions to accounting printers"

This example created a group named “Account_Printers” and sets the description.

Example 3: Create a single group and set Managed By

New-ADGroup -Name GIS_Images -GroupScope DomainLocal -ManagedBy robert.allen

In this example, I create a group named GIS_Images and set the managed by to the SAM account name (sAMAccountName) of robert.allen.

Example 4: Create a single group and add it to an organizational unit (OU)

New-ADGroup -Name Marketing_local -GroupCategory Security -Path "OU=ADPRO Groups,DC=ad,DC=activedirectorypro,DC=com"

This example creates the group “Marketing_local” and puts it in the OU named ADPRO Groups.

Now let’s look at creating AD groups in bulk.

Create AD Groups from CSV

The easiest way to bulk create AD groups is by using a CSV file. The CSV file will have all of the group details, we then use PowerShell to import the CSV and create the groups.

Step 1: CSV file configuration

Create a CSV file and add these columns

  • name
  • path
  • scope
  • category
  • description

Then fill in each column with the group details. Here is a screenshot of my CSV. You can add additional parameters to the CSV you will just need to update the script below to include them.

Save the as a CSV (comma delimited) (.csv) file type. You can name the file name whatever you want.

Step 2: The Bulk Import Script

Here is the PowerShell script for bulk creating groups from the CSV.

You can copy and paste this into PowerShell. The only thing you need to change is the location of the CSV. 

Import-Module ActiveDirectory

#Import CSV
$groups = Import-Csv ‘c:\it\scripts\groups.csv‘


# Loop through the CSV
    foreach ($group in $groups) {

    $groupProps = @{

      Name          = $group.name
      Path          = $group.path
      GroupScope    = $group.scope
      GroupCategory = $group.category
      Description   = $group.description

      }#end groupProps

    New-ADGroup @groupProps
    
} #end foreach loop

Make sure you change this line to the path of the CSV file you created in step 1. 

$groups = Import-Csv ‘c:\it\scripts\groups.csv‘

Here is a screenshot of the script in PowerShell ISE.

Easily Bulk Create AD Groups with the AD Pro Toolkit

An alternative to PowerShell is to use the AD Pro Toolkit.

With this tool, you can easily perform the following actions:

  • Import Groups
  • Add Users to Groups
  • Remove Users from Groups
  • Bulk update group attributes
  • Create Group Reports

Step 1. Click on “Group Management” and then “Create Groups”.

Step 2. Download the included CSV template

Step 3. Fill out the template with your group details

Step 4. Select your template and click run.

Download AD Pro Toolkit and see how easy it is to create Active Directory groups.

Feel free to comment below if you have any questions.

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