Setting Up SPFx Development Environment Using NVS

Introduction

This was a basic topic before starting your development using SharePoint Framework, aka SPFx. There have been a lot of challenges for some of us while setting up the development environment. Some of those are,

• Getting a developer subscription, where Microsoft has stopped providing free developer subscriptions, is now limited to the Visual Studio subscription via personal or organization.
• Node version changes and other open-source tool version changes (React, TypeScript) and their compatibility with SPFx versions. In the references section, there is a chart that has supported node versions for SPFx.
• Setting up a development environment, where you need to go through multiple fixes to get it properly working.

This article focuses on setting up the development environment for SPFx based on the above challenges(#2,#3), and finally, you can also validate the setup by following simple steps. Please note that the steps are validated against Windows 11 OS, and a similar setup can be followed on other OS as NVS (Node Version Switcher); also, the tools used for SPFx development are cross-platform compatible.

Pre-requisites

You need to have Node Version Switcher (NVS) installed on your Windows 11 machine. Please refer to the references section to get NVS installed.

Steps

Please follow the below steps for setting up your SPFx development environment on a Windows 11 machine.

Step 1. Login to your machine using the credentials and make sure you have NVS installed on your machine. Just type NVS in the command prompt, you should be welcomed with available node versions.

Step 2. Install the node version that is supported by the latest version of SPFx. The latest SPFx version as of this article is 1.20.0, and the supported node version is 18.

npm install @microsoft/generator-sharepoint --global

Step 3. Install the supported yeoman version.

npm install yo --global

Step 4. Install the supported gulp version.

npm install gulp-cli --global

Step 5. Trust the Dev certificate. This is a time set up. SPFx uses a local web browser when testing the custom solutions and uses HTTPS by default. This HTTPS is implemented using a self-signed certificate. By default, the self-signed certificates are not trusted by your local development environment. It is required to configure the local development environment to trust the self-signed certificate. Run the command below from the root folder where you build your SPFx projects to trust the self-signed certificate using the gulp tool.

gulp trust-dev-cert 

Step 6. Set up the environment variable SPFX_SERVE_TENANT_DOMAIN.

It is beneficial to set up this environment variable, as this eliminates changing the variable in the server file while testing the SPFx webpart.

I want to test the solution against two environments in my case, a temporary setting of the environment variable works. If you have a server dedicated to a specific test/dev environment, then it is obvious to set the environment variable permanently.

Setting Environment variables temporarily

Use the below command in the Windows terminal to set the environment variable SPFX_SERVE_TENANT_DOMAIN. If the tenant name is contoso.com, set the variable to contoso.sharepoint.com. Please note that this is active during the terminal session, which means when closed, the settings are cleaned up.

Setting Environment variables permanently

Step 1. In the Windows 11 machine, just search for ‘Environment Variables’, and the first option you will get is ‘Edit the system environment variables’.

Step 2. Click on ‘Environment Variables’ in the ‘System Properties’ Pop-Up.

Step 3. Under the user variables, click ‘New’. Enter the variable name and value as shown in the below screenshot.

Step 4. Validate the environment variable if it was properly set. To do so, close and reopen the Windows terminal or command prompt window and type in the command below.

echo %SPFX_SERVE_TENANT_DOMAIN%

The above steps are finished, setting up the SharePoint development framework.

Testing

Now it's time to validate the above steps and making sure the SPFx set up is functioning as expected. For that, let us build a simple React webpart and test against the SharePoint workbench.

Step 1. Create a folder and change directory to the folder. In this case, I have named it as react-demo.

Step 2. Change directory to the folder. Type in the below command.

yo @microsoft/sharepoint

Step 3. It will be prompted to enter the solution name; I am leaving it as default.

Step 4. It would ask for which client-side component. In this case, I am selecting the WebPart.

Step 5. It asks for WebPart Name. I am leaving it as default. (HelloWorld) in this case.

Step 6. Next step is to ask for the framework. I am selecting ‘React’.

Step 7. It would take 2-3 minutes to scaffold the folder and download the required components. Once completed, you would be getting a ‘Success Message’ saying that ‘Congratulations’.

Step 8. Run gulp serve in the command prompt to check if the solution is showing in the workbench.

Step 9. Under the ‘Local’ click on the solution

Step 10. Once everything is working fine, the final output will be getting a ‘Well done’ message.

Conclusion

Thus, in this article we have seen setting up SPFx development environment using NVS (Node Version Switcher) and testing the setup by creating a simple hello world webpart using React framework.

References

• https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/dev/spfx/compatibility
• https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/dev/spfx/set-up-your-development-environment
• https://www.voitanos.io/blog/set-spfx-hosted-workbench-test-site/
• https://www.csharp.com/article/installing-nvs-on-windows-machine