Rajeev Pentyala – Microsoft Power Platform

Conventionally tools like Plugin Registration Tool (PRT) can be download from NuGet. Downloading and installing from NuGet is tedious because of following reasons:

• Difficult to launch the tools. Because the downloaded PRT gets stored in your local directory, to launch the tool, you have to go that folder and look for the .exe file to open.
• Difficult to upgrade the version. To upgrade the version of the tools, you have to download latest version form NuGet to your local storage.

Using Power Platform CLI, the tools download and launch process has been super simplified. Let me walk you through the process of installing and launching the tools using Power Platform CLI.

Lets first start with the basics.

What is Power Platform CLI

• Microsoft Power Platform CLI is a simple, one-stop developer CLI that empowers developers and ISVs to perform various operations in Microsoft Power Platform.
• Follow these steps to install.
• Once you install, run pac in the command prompt and you should see screen as below.

Steps to install the tools using Power Platform CLI

Once you install the Power Platform CLI in your machine, open the Visual Studio Command Prompt (You can also use VSCode).

• Run pac tool list command which lists the tool installation details.

• If you notice the above screen, ‘Installed’ value is ‘No’, which means I don’t have tools installed yet.

Install/Uninstall Plugin Registration Tool (PRT):

• Now, lets install Plugin Registration Tool (PRT). Its super simple.
• Execute pac tool prt command. PRT tool gets installed and launched in a blink.

• If you run the pac tool list command again, you should see the PRT installed status as Yes.

• To uninstall the PRT tool, run pac tool prt –clear

Launch the Plugin Registration Tool

Once you install the PRT to launch from the next time, you have 2 options.

• Open the PRT App from the ‘Start’.

• Open the Visual Studio Command Prompt and run pac tool prt command

Steps to install Package Deployer and Configuration Migration tools:

To install the Package Deployer (PD) and Configuration Migration (CMT) tools, follow the same steps we used for PRT. We just need to change the commands.

• To install Package Deployer Tool, run pac tool pd

• To install Configuration Migration Tool, run pac tool cmt

That’s how tools can be seamlessly downloaded and launched using the Power Platform CLI.

🙂