Try SharePoint Framework preview capabilities

Starting from version 1.5.0, you can try preview capabilities in the SharePoint Framework. This article outlines how to create SharePoint Framework projects using preview capabilities and the considerations that you should take into account when working with the preview capabilities.

Important

Creating SharePoint Framework projects using preview capabilities is meant for evaluation purposes only. Deploying projects using preview capabilities to production environments is not supported. Microsoft doesn't guarantee that any of the preview capabilities will be released to production tenants. Microsoft can change or remove preview capabilities without any prior notice.

What are SharePoint Framework preview features?

As the SharePoint Framework evolves, Microsoft would like to get feedback on the different capabilities considered for adding to the SharePoint Framework. At the same time, organizations have been asking for preview of future capabilities both to provide feedback and take them into account for their future projects.

Starting from version 1.5.0, Microsoft offers the ability for organizations to evaluate preview capabilities in SharePoint Framework. These capabilities are available through a separate set of npm packages tagged with the plusbeta label and range from additional API options to complete features. Even though commonly labels in SemVer are used to denote a pre-release, in this case, the plusbeta label indicates that the npm package contains additional preview functionality. For example, the 1.5.0-plusbeta version of the SharePoint Framework includes all the functionality released in the 1.5.0 version plus some extra experimental features.

When scaffolding SharePoint Framework projects using the regular SharePoint Framework Yeoman generator (@microsoft/generator-sharepoint), you can choose if you want to use the preview capabilities or not. Based on your choice, the generator will create a project which you can run in a production environment or a project that you can use to evaluate the experimental features. You should keep in mind, that there is no guarantee that the capabilities from a plusbeta version will be released in a future version of the SharePoint Framework and using solutions built using the plusbeta version in production is not supported.

Note

Feedback on provided preview capabilities is welcome using the issue list at sp-dev-docs GitHub repository.

Create SharePoint Framework projects using preview features

Starting from version 1.5.0, you can use the SharePoint Framework Yeoman generator to create projects that use preview features of the SharePoint Framework. To include preview capabilities, add the plusbeta switch to the yo command, for example:

yo @microsoft/sharepoint --plusbeta

After executing this command, the SharePoint Framework Yeoman generator, will scaffold a new SharePoint Project using whatever preview capabilities are available at that moment. For additional information about the available preview capabilities, refer to the release notes of the SharePoint Framework Yeoman generator.

If plusbeta switch was used, package.json will reference different packages for the scaffolded project with the @plusbeta tag.