Enabling the Developer Site Collection Feature in SharePoint Online

I have been doing a bit of work updating some of our content for apps lately, and I found a couple areas where I needed to enable the developer site collection feature for a new site collection.  You might want to enable the developer site collection feature when you need to side-load an app and deploy directly from Visual Studio.  There isn’t a button in the site collection features to let you enable this. 

If you were on-premises, you’d just run Enable-SPFeature:

 Enable-SPFeature e374875e-06b6-11e0-b0fa-57f5dfd72085 –url https://sp.contoso.com

However, we can’t do that with SharePoint Online as the PowerShell cmdlets don’t expose the ability to turn features on and off.  There are a few ways to do this by taking advantage of the Client Side Object Model.

Using PowerShell

One way would be to install the excellent (and free!) SharePoint Client Browser for SharePoint 2010 and 2013.  It includes an extremely useful feature to open up PowerShell with the CSOM already loaded.

Using that PowerShell window, you could then easily use the client side object model (CSOM) to enable the developer feature.

 $ctx.Load($ctx.Site);
$ctx.ExecuteQuery();
$guid = [System.Guid]"e374875e-06b6-11e0-b0fa-57f5dfd72085"
$ctx.Site.Features.Add($guid,$true,[Microsoft.SharePoint.Client.FeatureDefinitionScope]::None)
$ctx.ExecuteQuery();

Too easy.

Creating an App

Of course, I am lazy and I don’t want to have to dig up that PowerShell code each time I do this.  I want to be able to just click a button like I do in the site collection features dialog.  I can do that by creating a simple SharePoint hosted app.  In Visual Studio, create a new app for SharePoint.  Replace the contents of app.js.

 'use strict';

var context = SP.ClientContext.get_current();


// This code runs when the DOM is ready and creates a context object which is needed to use the SharePoint object model
$(document).ready(function () {
    var site = context.get_site();
    context.load(site);
    context.executeQueryAsync(function () {
        site.get_features().add("e374875e-06b6-11e0-b0fa-57f5dfd72085", true, 0);
        context.executeQueryAsync(function () {
            alert("added the developer site feature to the site collection!");
        },
            function(sender, args){
                alert("unable to add the developer site feature to the site collection: " + args );
            });
    },
    function (sender, args) {
        alert("oops! " + args);
    });
});

Go to the appmanifest for your app and request Manage permission for the site collection.

Package the app and then add the .app package to the app catalog for your tenant.  Now you can go to any site in your tenancy where you are a site collection administrator and add the app.  Click on the app to execute the code above, and then optionally uninstall the app from that site so that other users don’t feel compelled to click on it. 

Now it’s as simple as add the app, execute it, then uninstall the app.  You might add additional capabilities, such as a toggle button to enable/disable the feature, but I’ll leave that as an exercise to the reader.

Comments

• Anonymous
  April 28, 2014
  Excellent post! it is really helpful. What method should call (instead of Site.Features.Add) if i want to disable a feature instead of enabling? $ctx.Site.Features.Add($guid,$true,[Microsoft.SharePoint.Client.FeatureDefinitionScope]::None)

• Anonymous
  April 28, 2014
  Never tried it, but try the Remove method to see if that works for you. msdn.microsoft.com/.../jj246446(v=office.15).aspx

• Anonymous
  July 30, 2014
  Kirk, Very helpful and I appreciate this post; and sad at the same time how difficult Microsoft has made it to develop against SharePoint. Magic Guid values galore, and people having to create tools whose livelihood is purely SharePoint (Bram de Jager -- shout out. Great tool.)

• Anonymous
  September 28, 2014
  great article. Is there an way to get the names of all the activated features on a particular site collection using an app? thanks in advance

• Anonymous
  September 28, 2014
  @gautam - I'm honestly not sure, if you find an answer please do post and let the community know!

• Anonymous
  May 07, 2015
  Do you know of any way to do this that doesn't require a paid version of Visual Studio? I don't have enough other use to justify buying it, but this would be really valuable functionality.

• Anonymous
  May 07, 2015
  @Ryan - use PowerShell or use the System.IO.Packaging namespace to package the .app file.  I don't have source or a link for you to show how to use System.IO.Packaging, but it can be used with Mono.