Announcing the General Availability of GitHub Actions for Microsoft Power Platform

Kartik Kanakasabesan (HE/HIM), Principal Program Manager, Wednesday, 30 June 2021

We are excited to announce that today, we are making GitHub actions for Microsoft Power Platform generally available. This capability truly expands the coverage for enterprises that want to implement CI/CD with Power Platform Applications driven from a source code first view.

Figure 1: Fusion Development with a CI/CD Pipeline to enable Enterprise Application Lifecycle Management

We recognize that any modern enterprise today wants to deploy their business applications through fully automated build and release pipelines, even if that application is built with low code. To support this, we first enabled this capability with the Power Platform Build Tools, an extension for Azure DevOps and are now introducing these same capabilities on GitHub, with the GitHub Actions for Power Platform. This enables professional developers to create GitHub Workflows that make the move from code to cloud even faster, all embedded within the source code itself.

As part of the general availability, we are also thrilled to announce that the actions can now run on both Windows and Ubuntu Linux runners.

How do I get started?

GitHub Actions for Power Platform are available here, and if you need help getting started, we have also made a lab available here with a few sample workflows to help you along.

Figure 2: GitHub Market Place with the Power Platform actions ready to install

To learn more about GitHub actions and workflows in general, we recommend reading the following resources from GitHub:

Introduction to GitHub Actions – GitHub Docs

Learn GitHub Actions – GitHub Docs

What capabilities are available with the GitHub Actions?

There are two types of actions available:

Administrative actions:

The administrative functions deal with capabilities like:

Create an environment.
Delete an environment.
Backup an environment.
Restore an environment.
Reset an environment.

Actions for Solution Management and Package management:

These actions are used to automate solution management and package management and includes:

Pack solution
Unpack solution
Export solution
Import solution
Publish solution
Upgrade solution
Deploy Package

Additionally, a Helper function “Who-am-I” is also available. This helper function helps you validate that you are authenticated and can connect to the Power Platform environment that you are running the actions/workflow against.