Downloading/Extracting WSP (Solution) from SharePoint

Background

Last week I was working on a SharePoint project where I had to get all the wsp’s deployed in the farm and I was not able to find few .wsp files anywhere in the Central Administration server. In the Central Administration Solution Properties screen, there is an option to Retract the solution but no option to Download the solution

Solution

I am not sure if there is a way to do this using stsadm. But definitely we can do this using SharePoint PowerShell.To run this command, you need to be a member of the Farm Administrators group and have permission to the configuration database

$farm = Get-SPFarm

$file = $farm.Solutions.Item("deployedsolutionname.wsp").SolutionFile

$file.SaveAs("c:\temp\deployedsolutionname.wsp")