Hydrate Development Environments via Power Platform Pipelines
I am a big fan of Power Platform Pipelines! Shocker, I know. One of the things I've heard from people is how their development environments have been lost, deleted, restored, overridden, personal dev has left without exporting solutions or they got turned into a washing machine and this is one of the reasons Power Platform Pipelines are so useful.
When trying to rebuild Development environments you always find a problem. You find a missing solution or that someone didn't save the unmanaged solution. You try to hack apart, rebuild, reconfigure and hope that it matches UAT and Prod. Sometimes you get lucky, sometimes you don't. Pipelines give you access to all the managed and unmanaged solutions that have been deployed via Pipelines, another great reason to use them.
However, you have to go into your Deployment Pipeline Configuration application and download each solution individually and then re-import one by one to re-hydrate your development environment. But Microsoft have released a new update which helps with this, you can now select which solution to import into each environment, regardless of if the environment is in the pipeline or not and you can chose to install the unmanaged or manage solution as well.
To get started, you need to turn on a setting in the Deployment Pipeline Configuration application, otherwise you may see this option in your pipeline host but it may appear and then disappear from other environments. I think this is a bug, but turning on the feature solves it...as it should. But this toggle enables this for all users who have access to these environments.
Open the app and navigate to the Advanced Settings area.
Then set "Import from Pipelines Host" to Yes. This is all you need. Now navigate to the environment you want to import solutions into and go to Solutions and choose Import.
This will open the solution import screen, but now it is different.
You now have the option to install from this device, meaning your computer with a file downloaded, or Pipelines.
N.b. You only have this option if your environment is not designated as a target environment in a Pipeline.
Choose Pipelines gives you a list of solution files you have access to and the ability to install. If you do not have access to a solution file, you will not see it here.
You can search for solutions, sort and filter by managed or unmanaged solutions. You can see when solution files were created, which version it is, which can help determine which solution you want to deploy.
Once a solution is selected, press the next button and then it takes you through the regular solution import screens/process.
While this method does allow you to install unmanaged solutions, it does not enable you to deploy unmanaged solutions through pipelines. This is more of a manual process which can help admins, but extremely useful.
Ciao for now
MCJ