Setup SharePoint Starter Kit from any platform

SharePoint Starter Kit allows you to test-drive modern SharePoint experiences on your own tenant, and now you can set it up from any platform.

Modern SharePoint

Over the last few years, Microsoft has been heavily investing in improving the user experience of SharePoint for both collaboration and communication. It was a challenging task, because many organizations use SharePoint in different ways for different purposes and it was hard to envision a solution that would cater to everybody’s needs.

Fast forward to today, modern SharePoint experiences support the most common scenarios that organizations use SharePoint for. Many organizations have already switched to using modern experiences, and many more are evaluating how they would benefit of modernizing their intranets. And to help them experience first-hand, how modern experiences could be put together as an organizational portal, SharePoint PnP released the SharePoint Starter Kit.

Experience modern experiences

Think of the SharePoint Starter Kit as a mini-intranet. It has a welcome page, with a combination of first-party and custom web parts, it contains a few sites combined together using a Hub Site, it has navigation, some content and shows how the different modern capabilities ranging from UX to site scripts and -designs could be a part of an intranet.

And it’s an open source solution where the community can, and already has been submitting improvements for.

SharePoint Starter Kit - for everybody

Initially, when the SharePoint Starter Kit was released, you could set it up only using a PowerShell script based on the PnP Provisioning Engine and PnP PowerShell. Unfortunately, both dependencies work only on Windows so to provision the Starter Kit, you had to use Windows too.

Being a macOS user and contributing to the Starter Kit myself, I wanted to have a way to provision the Starter Kit, without having to use a VM. And so over the last few months, I’ve been working on a cross-platform script using the Office 365 CLI and Bash to provision the SharePoint Starter Kit from any platform. Just before the Christmas, we’ve added the last missing command to the Office 365 CLI required for provisioning the Starter Kit and I was able to complete the setup script.

Provision the SharePoint Starter Kit from any platform

To provision the SharePoint Starter Kit, you need Bash, the latest beta of the Office 365 CLI and jq.

After installing these tools, go to https://github.com/waldekmastykarz/pnp-starterkit-setup and either clone or download the repository. Double check the prerequisites listed in the readme to avoid setup errors. To start the setup, execute in the command line:

./setup.sh --tenantUrl https://contoso.sharepoint.com --prefix pnp_

The setup script allows you to specify some additional options, like the name of the company to use in the provisioning or the city to use to show the weather forecast for. See the readme for the complete list of available options.

If all goes well, after a few minutes the setup will complete and you will be able to test the SharePoint Starter Kit on your tenant.

So far a number of people used the script and successfully set up the Starter Kit on their tenants.

As the Starter Kit will be evolving in the future, we’ll be updating the setup script to allow you to provision it from any platform. In the future, you can expect the script to be a part of the Starter Kit so that you can find it from a central location.

Provision the SharePoint Starter Kit from any platform with the cross-platform setup script. Let me know if it worked for you, how you like it and how we could improve it.