Power Platform CLI January update

We are delighted to announce the release of our January update for the Power Platform CLI. We have made quite a few improvements in this update. Here are a few things that are worth trying out with this new update.

Device Code authentication support

When using the Power Platform Extension of Visual Studio Code, users mentioned that they did not like that, they had to explicitly type their username and password in the terminal window. To that effect, we now support device code authentication with -dc parameter in pac auth create command.

When a user wants to logon, they need to provide the url for the environment. You will be given a device code to get a token from Azure AD. From here open a browser session on a device where you have interactive UI experiences launch and go to the URL: https://microsoft.com/devicelogin

Enter the code that was provided to you on the terminal prompt and then proceed to provide your Azure AD username and password

Then click on continue and then you are authenticated via the command line without exposing the username and password. Now you can proceed to interact with the Power Platform using either CodeSpaces/VS Code Extension or the Stand-alone Power Platform CLI

PAC Solution version capability

We have also revamped the version capability as well. We have introduced 2 new parameters -rv for revision version or -bv for build version. The version numbering sequence used by Power Platform for solutions is Major.Minor.Build.Revision. You can now use these parameters to increment the build and revision numbers of the solution that you are importing into power platform. The Major and Minor numbers are only incremented when exporting via power platform or if your strategy parameter for version uses Git tags. Here is an example of using pac solution version -rv 6

pac solution version -bv 1

the solution version –strategy commands are only for build values increments.

Few other commands to explore

If you have multiple versions of the Stand-alone Power platform CLI installed you can do

pac use <version #> to switch to different versions of PAC CLI

to install the latest version of Power Platform CLI, you can do, pac install latest

pac solution online-version is the command to use to update major and minor numbers for solutions.

This will go online and change the version numbers in Dataverse for the solution. This way DevOps engineers, and Application Lifecycle management practitioners would be able accurately reflect version history as it maps to their Source code repository versioning as well, from a major,minor number perspective.

Please try out some of these new capabilities, we have developed in the February update and provide us feedback at ISVFeedback@Microsoft.com or The PowerUsers community