Prerequisites: A completed scenario 7.
To create an online development environment, we need to authenticate to our Business Central Admin API using OAuth. The Create Online Dev. Environment workflow works unattended if you provide a secret called AdminCenterApiCredentials (either as a GitHub Secret or in a keyvault).
At the time when writing this, the Admin Center API does not yet support S2S, meaning that the AdminCenterApiCredentials cannot be formatted like explained in section 3, but needs to be formatted as:
{"refreshtoken":"refreshtoken"}
Getting the refreshtoken can be done using this command on a machine with BcContainerHelper installed:
New-BcAuthContext -includeDeviceLogin | ConvertTo-GitHubGoCredentials | Set-Clipboard
If you do NOT provide an AdminCenterApiCredentials secret, the workflow will initiate a device code flow and you can login using https://aka.ms/devicelogin using this code and have the workflow continue. In order to get the code, you will have to inspect the details of the workflow and open the job called Check AdminCenterApiCredentials / Initiate Device Login (open to see code)
- On github.com, under Actions select the Create Online Dev. Environment workflow, choose Run workflow and specify the requested environment name and whether you want to reuse the environment if it already exists and choose Run workflow.
- When the workflow is complete, inspect the pull request to see the changes in launch.json. This environment can now be used from a developer but note that two developers cannot share one online environment.
- Merge the pull request and you are ready to do rapid application development (RAD).