A trial environment is a free, separate Power Platform environment with its own Dataverse database, for 30 days. It's the cheapest way to test installing a solution somewhere other than where you built it. This guide creates one in the Power Platform admin center, limited to one security group.
A Power Apps trial gives your account, for 30 days, what a Power Apps per user plan includes, and Microsoft requires it before you can create a trial environment, even if you're an admin. This guide starts the trial from the page Microsoft links to, and shows what changed afterwards and what didn't.
A manager opened a shared app in a new trial environment and got You can't open apps in this environment. You are not a member of the environment's security group. He was a member. The cause is how trial environments add people, and the fix is to add them to the environment yourself, or have them open the app again.
I created a Microsoft Entra group team, ticked Basic User, selected Save and got a success message. When I opened the team's roles again, nothing was ticked. Selecting Save in the roles pane only opens a confirmation, and the role is assigned when you select Save a second time, in that confirmation.
The app and its setup flow both work. This part turns them into four files anyone can install: both solutions, checked, at version 1.0.0.0, as managed and unmanaged zips, and without this tenant's SharePoint site and lists inside them.
When you export a solution, its environment variables' current values go into the zip, so everyone who installs it gets your values. This guide takes them out with the Power Platform CLI: unpack the managed and unmanaged exports together, delete the value files, and pack both zips again.
Exporting turns a solution into a zip file that another environment can import: managed to install it, unmanaged to keep developing it. This guide exports the same solution both ways, with the same version number, and then does it with the Power Platform CLI.
The solution checker reads everything in a solution against Microsoft's best-practice rules and lists what it finds, each with a severity and a link to guidance. This guide runs it in Power Apps, reads the results, and runs the same check from the Power Platform CLI, whose result file also says which control each issue is on.
An exported solution is an ordinary zip file. Listing what's inside shows what you're about to share: its version, whether it's managed, and anything that shouldn't travel with it, such as your environment variables' values. This guide does it in a terminal on macOS, Linux and Windows.
The Power Platform CLI, pac, exports, checks and imports solutions from a terminal, but first it has to sign in. This guide signs it in with a device code, chooses the environment it works with, and checks the result.
