Month: June 2019

Securing your AzureDevOps SharePoint tenant credentials with an Azure key Vault.

Marky Roden Azure Key Vault, AzureDevOps, SharePoint Framework , , ,

If you are following an automated Build and Release process for your SharePoint Framework then you will have come across the need to store your tenant SharePoint admin username and password as variables in the pipeline.

Whle this works and I believe the credentials are encrypted, this is not going to fly with enterprise corporate security. They are going to insist that the credentials are kept centrally in a secure KeyVault. Conveniently for us, a KeyVault is available for us to use in Azure.

Using the process described by the Azure DevOps Labs team you can set up a KeyVault and integrate it into your pipeline.

I am adding the KeyVault pipeline into an older version of an SPFx release (for the most up to date doc check this post out).

Once that is run the new password is successfully utilized instead of the variable I had stored within Azure DevOps.

 

Fixing SPFx node-sass binding error on ADO release pipeline

Marky Roden AzureDevOps, O365, Office 365, SharePoint, SharePoint Framework, SPFx , , ,

When trying to run the gulp upload-to-sharepoint  encountered the following issue when creating a release pipeline for an SPFx web-part. There was a problem with no binding available for node-sass

[command]C:\NPM\Modules\gulp.cmd upload-to-sharepoint –gulpfile D:\a\r1\a\build\release\gulpfile.js –ship –username *** –password *** –tenant mckinseyandcompany –cdnsite sites/apps/ –cdnlib ClientSideAssets
2019-06-12T14:51:53.5954467Z [14:51:53] Working directory changed to D:\a\r1\a\build\release
2019-06-12T14:51:54.5490645Z D:\a\r1\a\build\release\node_modules\node-sass\lib\binding.js:15
2019-06-12T14:51:54.5497252Z throw new Error(errors.missingBinary());
2019-06-12T14:51:54.5498022Z ^
2019-06-12T14:51:54.5498662Z
2019-06-12T14:51:54.5499258Z Error: Missing binding D:\a\r1\a\build\release\node_modules\node-sass\vendor\win32-x64-48\binding.node
2019-06-12T14:51:54.5499538Z Node Sass could not find a binding for your current environment: Windows 64-bit with Node.js 6.x
2019-06-12T14:51:54.5499731Z
2019-06-12T14:51:54.5499883Z Found bindings for the following environments:
2019-06-12T14:51:54.5500034Z – Windows 64-bit with Node.js 8.x

and the error was actually staring us in the face – “binding available for Node 8″……..

The solution, just like for the build process, you have to add an agent task to ensure the correct version of node is used for the release process.

Using npm ci as part of the SPFx CI CD process through Azure Dev Ops

Marky Roden AzureDevOps, SharePoint, SharePoint Framework, SPFx , ,

During the Automated Build and Deploy process for a SharePoint Framework Web Part (as documented here) one of the steps you go through to install the application on the build server is a familiar step ‘npm install’.

This works just fine when working locally and should be, but it is inefficient as part of an automated build process.

For a good explaination of why, check out this stackoverflow answer https://stackoverflow.com/questions/52499617/what-is-the-difference-between-npm-install-and-npm-ci/53325242#53325242

npm install reads package.json to create a list of dependencies and uses package-lock.json to inform which versions of these dependencies to install. If a dependency is not in package-lock.json it will be added by npm install.

npm ci (named after Continuous Integration) installs dependencies directly from package-lock.json and uses package.json only to validate that there are no mismatched versions. If any dependencies are missing or have incompatible versions, it will throw an error.

In my experience this can speed up the build process by more than 50% and as the npm install is the rate determining step for the overall buil, this is very helpful.

The step in the process for the build should look like this:

I have submitted a pull request to update the documentation and we will see if it is worthy 🙂

 

 

Correcting SPFx gulp –ship Uglify Errors: Unexpected token: punc (()

Marky Roden O365, Office 365, SharePoint, SharePoint Framework, SPFx , , ,

We came across the following problem when trying to execute a gulp --ship on out SPFx development


[15:03:34] Starting subtask 'webpack'...
[15:03:49] Error - [webpack] 'dist':
list-view-demo-webpart-web-part.js from UglifyJs
Unexpected token: punc (() [list-view-demo-webpart-web-part.js:962,7]

In researching this issue it turns out that this issue stems from a problem with the webpack uglify plugin (uglify-webpack-plugin) which historically does not work with ES6 code.

From what I read, it seems like the current SPFx 1.8 does use the correct version of webpack and the uglify plugin to avoid this issue but it was still coming up.

We solved the issue by implementing a suggestion to a related issue on github

https://github.com/SharePoint/sp-dev-docs/issues/2782

The key was presented in one of the responses to the issue

https://github.com/SharePoint/sp-dev-docs/issues/2782#issuecomment-475519680

By replacing the uglify plugin with the terser plugin for webpack, the issue was resolved and we were able to Build and deploy.