Introduction to pac cli

The Power Apps CLI, also known as pac, is the tool provided by Microsoft for developers to build and manage their Power Apps projects from the command line and offering several helpful commands. It is particularly useful for tasks such as creating and managing Power App projects, working with solution files, and interacting with Dataverse - and so much more. And of course, even though it is meant to be for Developers, and it is a command line tool - it surely offers a lot of functionalities that non developers, low code or citizen developers will also benefit from. Therefore, I decided to start a new series and document over the next weeks some functionalities, while having a look myslef at all the different functionalities as I juest realized that there are so many functionalities I have not worked with yet.

So let’s start with the beginning and how you could start working with the pac tool.

When I first installed the pac tool a few years ago, it has been as part of PCF Development following some guidance by Scott Durow and Danish Naglekar and there had been no additional tools around to help or automate the work with pac. since then it has changed quite a bit and you also do not need to install the pac solutione with .Net or Windows MSI, if you are only going to use it within vscode. If vscode is the only use case, you can just install the Power Platform Tools Extension by Microsoft and you will have access to pac in the terminal of vscode. Otherwise, you must use either the MSI or .NET installation method and you can use pac in vscode, Powershell or Command Prompt.

If you are not a developer and not sure about working with Powershell or Command Line, just start with the vscode extension and you can install one of the other versions later as well to activate these in addition.

Install from within Visual Studio Code:

1. In Visual Studio Code, select the Extensions icon in the navigation bar.
2. Search for “Power Platform Tools” by Microsoft
3. Select the Install button in the search results on the nuttom right.
4. Once the extension is installed, pac is enabled in vscode and a Power Platform icon is installed in the navigation bar on the left.

When you select the Power Platform Tool, a sidebar will be opened on the left of your vscode window, where you can manage your Power Platform Authentication Profiles and at the bottom see your environments & Solustions.

When you just installed the extension, chances are high, that both windows are emty and you have to start with creating your first Authentication profile. in this case, you can either use the respective pac command or just use the extension to create and manage your profiles.

Nice to know

Installing Power Platform Tools Extension inside Visual Studio Code has another benefit. It will also run in other operating systems like Linux and MacOS and you will have the same experience in all systems.

Install downloadable solution

You can install the Power Apps CLI from the official Microsoft download page. Once installed, you can access it from any command line interface by typing pac followed by the command you want to execute.

https://aka.ms/PowerPlatformCLI