Recommendations¶
ALM Accelerator¶
Note: The Accelerator does not support CI/CD for Logic Apps.
As seen in the Engineering Tools section, the ALM Accelerator is a great choice for CI/CD.
If the solution for your project is built using Power Apps and Power Pages, we recommend using ALM Accelerator to satisfy the Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment (CI/CD). Documentation for how to use this tool can be found here.
Note: There is a feature in preview in Power Platform that can manage a CD flow but does not currently handle source control or CI. This does not currently interfere with the accelerator.
The Accelerator follows many of the principles outlined in CI/CD subsection, which are also encouraged in the Checklist section. Some of the principles are:
- opinionated separation of environments,
- An established branching strategy,
- Integration with Azure DevOps (AzDO) that manages the source code and
- Migration of solutions between the Power Platform environments.
The principles of Source Control are also handled in an automated way.
Using the accelerator strikes a balance between supporting citizen developers and supporting their code-first developer counterparts. Citizen developers have a user interface that abstracts away the underlying code. At the same time, in a "behind-the-scenes" way, a code-first developer can still follow the engineering fundamentals: code reviews, automated testing support, solution validation, and environment management.
Tools¶
The other tools that are helpful in managing the CI/CD of your solution:
- Microsoft Power Platform CLI (
PAC CLI
) is a command-line tool that supports, among other things, the import and export of Power Platform Solutions, and packing to and unpacking from Power Platform Solutions source files.PAC CLI
is available as a stand-alone command line tool or as an extension for Visual Studio Code.
Note that the stand-alone tool requires Windows to run, while the VS Code extension runs wherever VS Code runs.
- Power Platform Build Tools. A set of wrappers around the
PAC CLI
that run in an Azure DevOps pipeline.
- GitHub Actions for Microsoft Power Platform. A set of wrappers around the
PAC CLI
that run in a GitHub Workflow.