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We’ve just published a new version of the CLI for Microsoft 365 with new commands for working with and managing Microsoft 365 tenants and SharePoint Framework projects on any platform.
Manage Microsoft 365 and SharePoint Framework projects on any platform
CLI for Microsoft 365 is a cross-platform CLI that allows you to manage various configuration settings of Microsoft 365 and SharePoint Framework projects no matter which operating system or shell you use.
While building solutions for Microsoft 365 expands beyond the Windows operating system, managing many of the platform settings is possible only through PowerShell on Windows. As more and more users work on non-Windows machines, it’s inconvenient for them to have to use a Windows virtual machine to configure their tenants. With the CLI for Microsoft 365, you can configure your tenant no matter which operating system you use. Additionally, using CLI for Microsoft 365, you can manage your SharePoint Framework projects.
New version of CLI for Microsoft 365 – v3.7
With the release of SharePoint Framework v1.12, we release this new version of CLI for Microsoft 365 to help you upgrade your projects. Along with it, we included some new commands and improvements. Here are some of the most noteworthy additions. For the full list of changes, see our release notes.
Upgrade SharePoint Framework projects to v1.12
Microsoft has just released a new version of SharePoint Framework v1.12. The most notable improvements are support for Node@12, including custom Teams manifests and support for building Teams meetings apps. For the full list of features, see the documentation.
Upgrading SharePoint Framework projects goes beyond updating dependencies to the latest version. Often, there are changes to the different files in the project. To help you upgrade your SPFx project to the latest version and benefit from the latest improvements, we offer you a one-command upgrade.
To get a list of changes necessary to upgrade your project to the latest version of the SharePoint Framework, execute in the folder of your SharePoint Framework project:
m365 spfx project upgrade –output md > report.md
This will generate a Markdown report with all findings. From the summary section of the report, you can copy a complete set of commands to run to update all packages.
If you want to better understand what’s changed and where, I’d recommend you use the CodeTour report, which you can get by executing:
m365 spfx project upgrade –output tour
When you open your SharePoint Framework project in VSCode, you will get an interactive tour of all the locations in your project that needs an update.
Ensure that you have all prerequisites for building apps using SharePoint Framework v1.12
SharePoint Framework v1.12 comes with a new set of prerequisites. To build apps on SPFx v1.12, you need to be using Node v12 and Gulp v4. To help you double check that you have all prerequisites and won’t hit any errors, we offer the spfx doctor command.
To check if your machine has all prerequisites for building apps using SPFx v1.12, install the SharePoint Framework Yeoman generator v1.12 and run:
m365 spfx doctor
The command will check if your machine for all prerequisites and tell you if there is anything missing.
Configure CLI to your personal preferences
As more and more people use CLI for Microsoft 365, we get more feedback about what they’d prefer CLI to work. Some of our users, prefer for example to automatically get command help when running the command fails. Others, prefer to see help only when they explicitly ask for. When you use CLI for building scripts, you might want it to use the JSON output by default. On the other hand, if you use it for quickly looking things up, you’d prefer to use the text mode.
Because the only person knowing best how to work is you, we want to give you the ability configure CLI to your personal preferences. In this release we introduce support for configuring CLI. The first option that you can set, is to choose if you want to automatically see help when running command failed. It’s turned on by default, and to turn it off you can run:
m365 cli config set –key showHelpOnFailure –value false
We’re planning to introduce the ability to configure the default output mode next. And if there are other things that you’d like to be able to configure, please let us know.
List application permissions for SharePoint sites
Recently, Microsoft released a new way of granting apps access to SharePoint sites. Rather than having apps access all sites, you can let them access selected sites only.
In this version of CLI for Microsoft 365, we introduce support for retrieving app permissions set on a specific site.
To get the list of permissions granted to apps on a specific site, execute:
m365 spo site apppermission list –siteUrl https://contoso.sharepoint.com/sites/project-x
To get more information about a specific site app permission, execute:
m365 spo site apppermission get –siteUrl https://contoso.sharepoint.com/sites/project-x –permissionId aTowaS50fG1zLnNwLmV4dHw4OWVhNWM5NC03NzM2LTRlMjUtOTVhZC0zZmE5NWY2MmI2NmVAZGUzNDhiYzctMWFlYi00NDA2LThjYjMtOTdkYjAyMWNhZGI0
In the future versions of CLI for Microsoft 365, you can expect more commands allowing you to manage app permissions for SharePoint sites.
Changes
We’ve continued improving CLI, building upon the changes we’ve introduced in the previous version.
Improved managing SharePoint pages and sites
CLI for Microsoft 365 is a great tool for automating managing your Microsoft 365 tenant and SharePoint Framework projects. It’s also great as an engine to build other tools on top!
Elio Struyf has build a static site generator for SharePoint named Doctor. If you want to author product documentation or a knowledgebase in Markdown but publish it to SharePoint, Doctor is the tool for the job! As Elio is extending Doctor with new capabilities, he’s contributed a number of enhancements to managing pages and sites with CLI for Microsoft 365.
Added Remote Development container
One of the things that often stand in the way of contributing to open source projects is setting up the dev environment. Often, specific projects require specific tools and sometimes even specific versions of them. If you’re not using the particular stack in your daily work, it can be cumbersome to even get started.
To help you contribute to CLI for Microsoft 365, we’d like to introduce a Remote Developer container. Using GitHub Codespaces, it allows you to get up and running your dev environment in minutes, without worrying about installing dependencies. We’ll provide instructions on how to get started using the Remote Development container shortly.
Sample scripts
CLI for Microsoft 365 is a great tool both for quick adjustments to the configuration of your Microsoft 365 tenant as well as automating more complex tasks. Because CLI for Microsoft 365 is cross-platform you can use it on any OS and in any shell. To help you get started using the CLI for Microsoft 365 for automation scenarios, we started gathering some sample scripts.
If you have any scripts that you use frequently, please share them with us so that we can learn more about the common automation scenarios.
Provision a Team with channels and assign a custom icon
A sample script which creates a Microsoft 365 Group, associates a logo to it and some members. Afterward, it teamyfies the Group and creates two public channels.
List site collections and their lists
This script helps you to list and export all site collection and their lists SharePoint Online sites, ideal for getting insights into the size of your environment.
List all external users in all site collections
This script helps you to list all external users in all SharePoint Online sites. It provides insights in who the users are, and if available who they where invited by.
Delete all Microsoft 365 groups and SharePoint sites
There are so many different ways to create Microsoft 365 groups. Teams, Planner, SharePoint team sites, etc. — you can accumulate a lot of them very fast. Use this script to delete the ones you no longer need.
Contributors
This release wouldn’t be possible without the help of (in alphabetical order) Aakash Bhardwaj, Luise Freese, Patrick Lamber, Michaël Maillot, Waldek Mastykarz, Arjun Menon, Abderahman Moujahid, Nanddeep Nachan, Albert-Jan Schot, Elio Struyf, Fredrik Thorild, Garry Trinder and Rabia Williams. Thank you all for the time you chose to spend on the CLI for Microsoft 365 and your help to advance it!
Work in progress
Here are some things that we’re currently working on.
More commands, what else
Microsoft 365 is evolving and new capabilities are being released every day. With CLI for Microsoft 365, we aim to help you manage your tenant on any platform in a consistent way, no matter which part of Microsoft 365 you interact with. While we keep adding new commands to CLI for Microsoft 365 each release, we still barely scratched the surface with what’s possible in Microsoft 365. In the upcoming versions of the CLI for Microsoft, you can expect us to add more commands across the different workloads in Microsoft 365.
Improved managing SharePoint pages
Microsoft keeps investing in modern SharePoint pages continuously introducing new capabilities to let us publish rich content. We’re looking into extending our support for managing modern SharePoint pages to let you use them to their full potential.
Improved creating Azure AD apps
Recently, we’ve introduced a command to easily create Azure AD app registrations. Because they’re backbone of every app you’d build on Microsoft 365, we think you should be able to create them as easily as possible. So with CLI for Microsoft 365, you can create a fully configured Azure AD app for the most common scenarios with just one line of code.
In the future versions of CLI for Microsoft 365 you can expect us extend the capabilities with additional scenarios and features supported by Azure AD.
Script examples
In every release of the CLI for Microsoft 365, we introduce new commands for managing Microsoft 365. With over 350 commands across the different Microsoft 365 services, the CLI for Microsoft 365 has become a powerful tool, not just for managing your tenant but also for automating your daily work.
We’d love to show you how you can use the CLI for Microsoft 365 to build automation scripts in PowerShell Core and Bash. If you have any scripts using SPO or PnP PowerShell that you use frequently, please share them with us so that we can learn more about the common automation scenarios.
ensure commands
We’ve just shipped our first ensure command – an easy way to help you that a site with specific settings exists. If it doesn’t, CLI creates it for you, if it does, CLI ensures it has the right properties. All in one line of code. We’d love to hear from you how you like it and if it’s something you’d like us to implement for other commands as well.
Try it today
Get the latest release of the CLI for Microsoft 365 from npm by executing in the command line:
npm i -g @pnp/cli-microsoft365
Alternatively, you can get the latest release from Docker by executing in the command line:
docker run –rm -it m365pnp/cli-microsoft365:latest
If you need more help getting started or want more details about the commands, the architecture or the project, go to aka.ms/cli-m365.
If you see any room for improvement, please, don’t hesitate to reach out to us either on GitHub or twitter.
Brought to you by Dr. Ware, Microsoft Office 365 Silver Partner, Charleston SC.
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