Environments

Environments

An environment in Work IQ Dev Tools is a named slot that holds the configuration and cloud resources for one instance of your plugin. The same project source can be provisioned into multiple environments, each with its own M365 app registration, tenant, and configuration values. Existing agent-focused projects use the same lifecycle concept.

By default, environments live in env/.env.<name> files inside your project. m365agents.yml can select a different project-contained environmentFolderPath. Work IQ Dev Tools name environments based on the file’s suffix: .env.local becomes local, .env.dev becomes dev, and so on.

The conventional names

Name	When to use it
local	Your laptop. Provisions to your own dev tenant. Recreated freely.
dev	Shared dev tenant for the whole team.
staging	Pre-production tenant for final validation.
prod	Production tenant — the one your real users hit.

These are conventions, not enforced names. Choose a portable filename segment such as qa or customer-acme, not a path. Existing agent projects can manage definitions with wiqd plugin add environment --name <name>.

How environments enter every command

Plugin lifecycle commands accept --env <name>. Use the same explicit environment when provisioning, packaging, validating source or packages, sharing, and publishing. Defaults and supported options remain command-specific.

The documentation uses dev as its standard example environment and passes --env dev explicitly. This does not change CLI defaults: commands that currently default to local still do so when the option is omitted.

wiqd plugin provision --env dev
wiqd plugin package --env dev
wiqd plugin validate --mode package --env dev --package-file "<zip>"
wiqd plugin publish --env dev

For lifecycle operations, the selected environment determines which .env.<name> file Work IQ Dev Tools read and which provisioned identity they use. Validation’s --env supplies source context; it does not select a ZIP or authenticate a package upload against the lifecycle environment’s tenant.

The first provision creates the slot

When you run wiqd plugin provision --env dev for the first time, Work IQ Dev Tools register the plugin and write the resulting IDs into .env.dev in the configured environment folder. Provision before package or share, which depend on that file. Re-provisioning uses the existing environment identity. Never commit credentials or assume provisioning commits files to Git.

Listing and inspecting

Use wiqd plugin show to inspect a plugin project. The following commands provide agent-focused views for existing agent projects:

• wiqd plugin list environments — show every environment defined in the project.
• wiqd plugin show --env dev — view the agent’s identity and provisioned resources for one environment.
• wiqd plugin show (no --env) — show all of them at once.

When you don’t need environments

wiqd plugin validate --mode source reads saved source using only the selected environment context (local by default). Use the same path/environment before packaging or provisioning. Package validation checks captured ZIP bytes; --env does not choose or rebuild that ZIP. provision, package, publish, eval, monitor, share and delete need the intended slot.

wiqd plugin validate --mode source checks the declarative-agent source surface offline without provisioning; use the same explicit project/environment context. Bare wiqd plugin validate defaults to package mode and uploads an existing ZIP. For package or Marketplace, pass --package-file "<exact.zip>" to select the intended artifact. Explicit ZIP-only input requires no source project. Otherwise the selected project must pass structural recognition and contain exactly one nonrecursive ZIP in appPackage/build/; missing or ambiguous ZIPs fail. --env never selects or rebuilds a ZIP. Agent evaluation targets a deployed declarative-agent component, not all capabilities in a plugin.

Go deeper

• Build a Plugin — where environments fit into plugin delivery
• Agent component lifecycle — existing agent-project workflows
• wiqd plugin list environments — list environments; use the sibling add/reset commands to mutate them
• wiqd plugin provision, wiqd plugin publish
• wiqd Core extension — the upstream that defines the .env.* file format