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name: plan-alm description: >- Creates an ALM (Application Lifecycle Management) plan for deploying a Power Pages site across environments. Gathers your promotion strategy, target environments, and approval requirements upfront, then generates a visual HTML plan document for your review and approval. plan-alm does not deploy anything itself — it is a planner. After you approve the plan, run the individual ALM skills (setup-solution, setup-pipeline, deploy-pipeline, or export-solution/import-solution); each detects the approved plan and executes the right step in order, keeping the plan updated as it runs. Use when asked to: "plan my alm", "set up alm", "create deployment plan", "plan my deployments", "help me deploy to multiple environments", "set up promotion strategy", "create cicd plan", "plan site promotion", "help me go to production", "set up pipeline for my site". user-invocable: true argument-hint: "Optional: 'pipelines' or 'manual' to skip strategy selection" allowed-tools: Read, Write, Edit, Bash, Glob, Grep, TaskCreate, TaskUpdate, TaskList, AskUserQuestion model: opus

Plugin check: Run node "${PLUGIN_ROOT}/scripts/check-version.js" — if it outputs a message, show it to the user before proceeding.

plan-alm

A 4-phase planner that gathers ALM strategy from the user, generates an HTML deployment plan, and gets approval. It does not execute anything — execution is delegated to the individual ALM skills, which the user runs afterward.

Overview

This skill detects the current project state (existing solution, pipeline), asks targeted questions about the desired promotion strategy (Power Platform Pipelines or Manual export/import), generates a visual docs/alm-plan.html, and gets user approval. The four phases are: Phase 1 — Detect, Phase 2 — Gather strategy, Phase 3 — Generate plan, Phase 4 — Approve & save.

plan-alm never deploys. The plan's steps[] array records the recommended execution sequence. After approval, the user invokes the individual skills — setup-solution, setup-pipeline (or export-solution), and deploy-pipeline (or import-solution) — in that order. Each of those skills detects the approved plan via its Phase 0 gate, proceeds without re-nagging, and refreshes the plan on completion. This separation is deliberate: it keeps plan-alm safe to run unattended (e.g. under autopilot) because no single answer can trigger an irreversible deployment.

Do NOT create tasks at the start — strategy is unknown until Phase 2 completes. Create both tasks in Phase 3 once the strategy is determined.

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Phase 1 — Detect Project State

Do NOT create tasks yet. Use natural language progress reporting only during this phase.

Steps:

0. Detect prior ALM deferral for this project. Before any discovery work, check whether the project root contains a .alm-deferred marker file. The marker is written by users who explicitly opted ALM-skill validators out of "missing artifacts" warnings (e.g. "this site is handled separately" or "ni-dev — no ALM"). If a user is now invoking plan-alm, we should surface that the marker is present and ask what to do, rather than silently proceeding (which would build a plan the user previously decided not to maintain) or silently removing the marker (which would re-enable nags on every other ALM skill).

   node "${PLUGIN_ROOT}/scripts/lib/check-alm-plan.js" --projectRoot "." --no-heartbeat
   

   Use --no-heartbeat here: this is a read-only deferral check by the planner, not an execution-skill Phase 0 gate. Without it, check-alm-plan.js would promote an already-Approved plan to In Execution (and refresh the heartbeat) just because you re-opened plan-alm — but re-planning isn't execution. Execution skills call it without --no-heartbeat so the first one to run does the Approved → In Execution promotion.

   <!-- gate: plan-alm:1.deferral | category=progress | cancel-leaves=deferral-marker -->

   🚦 Gate (progress · plan-alm:1.deferral): .alm-deferred marker present — continue and remove, continue and keep marker, or cancel. Determines whether downstream ALM skills resume gate enforcement.

   The helper returns { deferred, deferral, ... }. If deferred === true, read the deferral reason (deferral.reason or the raw marker text) and ask via AskUserQuestion:

   "This project has an .alm-deferred marker — {reason}. ALM was previously deferred here, so the other ALM skills (setup-solution, setup-pipeline, deploy-pipeline, …) skip their plan-completeness checks for this project. How would you like to proceed?"

   | Question | Header | Options | |---|---|---| | How would you like to proceed? | ALM deferral marker | Continue planning and remove the marker (Recommended), Continue planning but keep the marker (record deferral context in plan), Cancel |

   • Continue and remove marker (Recommended) → delete .alm-deferred (the user is re-engaging with ALM). Set DEFERRAL_CLEARED = true and proceed to step 1.
   • Continue and keep marker → set DEFERRAL_PRESERVED = true and DEFERRAL_REASON = {reason}. Proceed to step 1. Surface a one-line note in the Phase 1 step 9 user report (e.g. "Note: .alm-deferred is preserved — other ALM skills will continue to skip plan-completeness checks for this project.") so the user remembers the marker remains in effect after planning.
   • Cancel → exit cleanly (don't touch the marker).

   If deferred === false, skip this step silently and proceed to step 0b.

0b. Offer to approve an existing Draft in place (skip re-planning). The same check-alm-plan.js output from step 0 also carries exists and planStatus. When exists === true and planStatus === "Draft", the user already has a saved Draft plan — offer to approve it directly instead of regenerating the whole plan. (This is the only Draft→Approved path; without it, approving a draft means a full re-plan.)

<!-- gate: plan-alm:1.approve-draft | category=plan | cancel-leaves=nothing -->

🚦 Gate (plan · plan-alm:1.approve-draft): An existing Draft plan was found — approve it in place (no re-plan), re-plan from scratch, or cancel. Approving here writes the status via set-plan-status.js and exits without re-running discovery; no deployment is triggered.

Ask via AskUserQuestion:

"This site already has an ALM plan saved as Draft (docs/alm-plan.html). What would you like to do?"

| Question | Header | Options | |---|---|---| | What would you like to do? | Existing draft plan | Approve this draft now — no re-plan (Recommended), Re-plan from scratch, Cancel |

• Approve this draft now (Recommended) → capture the approver using the Phase 4 approver-capture procedure (the always-interactive prompt with git/OS-name prefill), then write the status atomically with the helper:

  node "${PLUGIN_ROOT}/scripts/lib/set-plan-status.js" --projectRoot "." --status Approved --approver "{APPROVER}" --render
  

  Commit (git add docs/alm-plan.html docs/.alm-plan-data.json && git commit -m "Approve ALM plan for {siteName}"), run skill tracking (Phase 4 finalize), print the Phase 4 next-steps guidance, and exit. Do not continue to step 1 — there is nothing to re-plan.

• Re-plan from scratch → proceed to step 1 (the rest of Phase 1 regenerates the plan; Phase 4 saves the new version).

• Cancel → exit cleanly (leave the Draft as-is).

If exists === false, or planStatus is anything other than "Draft" (Approved / In Execution / Completed / null), skip this step silently and proceed to step 1.

1. Resolve the site identity from the local project. .powerpages-site/website.yml is the source of truth for websiteRecordId and siteName, and it is present for both Power Pages site types:

   • Code / SPA sites — scaffolded by /power-pages:create-site and downloaded with pac pages download-code-site. These also have a powerpages.config.json and SPA source (src/, build output in dist//build/).
   • Data-model sites (standard and enhanced data model / "EDM") — downloaded with pac pages download --modelVersion 1|2. These have no powerpages.config.json; instead .powerpages-site/ holds the config tree (web-pages/, web-templates/, content-snippets/, …) plus a .powerpages-site/.portalconfig/ manifest pair. There is no local build output.

   Resolution order (first match wins):

   1. .powerpages-site/website.yml (preferred, present for every downloaded/deployed site) — read with the Read tool and extract:
      • id field → websiteRecordId
      • name field → siteName (the file uses short keys; it is name:, not adx_name:)
   2. powerpages.config.json (fallback — code/SPA sites only; used during plugin development from this repo root or for sites scaffolded but not yet deployed) — read siteName and websiteRecordId.

   Determine SITE_TYPE (recorded in planData as siteType and used to skip SPA-only assumptions below; it is a data field in docs/.alm-plan-data.json, not rendered in the HTML):

   • declarative when .powerpages-site/.portalconfig/ exists, or .powerpages-site/website.yml resolved while no powerpages.config.json is present. (This value was formerly data-model; plans written before the rename may still carry data-model, which is equivalent.)
   • code when powerpages.config.json is present.

   If neither marker is found, stop with:

   "No Power Pages site found in the current directory. Run this skill from your site project root — that's where .powerpages-site/ lives after pac pages download-code-site (code/SPA site) or pac pages download --modelVersion 2 (enhanced data-model site). If you haven't created the site yet, run /power-pages:create-site first."

   environmentUrl is always re-confirmed from pac env who in step 4 — it does not need to come from either source.

2. Check for .solution-manifest.json in the project root:

   • Store SOLUTION_DONE = true if found, false otherwise
   • If found, read solution.uniqueName and store as SOLUTION_UNIQUE_NAME

3. Check for docs/alm/last-pipeline.json in the project root:

   • Store PIPELINE_DONE = true if found, false otherwise
   • If found, read pipelineName and stages[] for later use

4. Run silently:

   pac env who
   

   Capture the environment URL and display name. Store as DEV_ENV_URL and DEV_ENV_NAME. The URL label varies by PAC version: current PAC (2.8.x) prints it under Org URL:; older builds used Environment URL: — read whichever is present (there is no Environment URL: line on 2.8.x, so do not look only for that label). The display name is the Friendly Name: / Connected to... value. If you can't parse it reliably, leave DEV_ENV_URL empty — Step 6's verify-alm-prerequisites.js resolves the authoritative URL from pac env who via the shared getEnvironmentUrl() helper (which matches both labels) and returns it as .envUrl.

5. Run silently:

   node "${PLUGIN_ROOT}/scripts/lib/list-environments.js"
   

   Store the JSON array as ENV_LIST for pre-filling environment URLs in Phase 2. (This helper parses pac env list; the old pac env list --output json is invalid on current PAC CLI — pac env list only accepts --filter — so the helper exists to produce the JSON the table form doesn't. It prints [] and exits 0 if PAC is unauthenticated, so pre-fill simply degrades to manual entry.) Each entry is { displayName, environmentId, environmentUrl, uniqueName, active }.

6. Acquire dev environment token (silently):

   node "${PLUGIN_ROOT}/scripts/lib/verify-alm-prerequisites.js" --envUrl "{DEV_ENV_URL}"
   

   Store .token as DEV_TOKEN and .userId as userId.

   *Track plan quality.