Understanding the deployment cycle
The SharePoint framework provides a streamlined build and deployment pipeline relying on multiple commands to manage the lifecycle of a solution. As we explained in Chapter 3, Your First Steps with the SharePoint Framework, the SPFx toolchain uses Gulp and its tasks model to orchestrate build and deployment operations (i.e. gulp <task_name>).
These commands can be run locally for a manual deployment (for instance, in a development scenario) or automated through a continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) process. In both cases, the workflow is the same:
Figure 8.1 – SPFx deployment process
The SPFx solution lifecycle is divided into two distinct phases. The first one consists of generating a package for your solution (a .sppkg file) containing all needed resources (code, assets, etc.). This phase can be done locally or in a DevOps pipeline using SPFx-provided tasks. The second phase is to distribute...
