With the recent GA release of the Power Platform Build Tools, we added support for creating an environment on demand and use that environment in subsequent tasks, for example to generate a build artifact and then delete the environment afterwards.
- How do you use it? When you use the 'create an environment' task in your pipeline, that environment will be used in any task that follows and the best part is you don't even have to do anything - it just works. An example of a Build pipeline is outlined below that packs a solution from source control -> runs static analysis check on the solution -> creates a new environment -> imports the solution into the newly created environment -> exports it as a managed solution (generates the build artifact) -> deletes the environment -> publishes the build Artifact
Note that the URL defined in my service connection is overridden, it is the auth in the service connection that is used to ensure that the user credentials passed have sufficient privileges to create the environment. The Build Tools tasks that deals with environment actions such as create, backup, delete currently only supports username/pw auth. Support for Service Principals for those tasks is just around the corner...
Happy CI/CD'ing 😊
