Error occurred in deployment step ‘Install app for SharePoint’: SideLoading of apps is not enabled on this site

In order to publish a SharePoint hosted app to a site collection the site must be based on the developer site template or have the “Developer” Feature enabled on it.  The “Developer” Feature is marked as hidden in its definition so you must use PowerShell to enable the Feature. This error is caused when you try to deploy in a non-developer template site collection.

To avoid this error, either for SharePoint online or On-premise development, try first to create a site collection based on the Developer template and deploy your SharePoint-hosted app to this site collection. If you are deploying to a non-developer template site collection, which is something you shouldn’t be doing then here are the live links to download the SharePoint Online Management Shell i.e. for SharePoint online scenario and associated PowerShell scripts as described in the screenshot below:

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Hello world SharePoint-hosted app

As indicated in my last blog post, I am running the Apps for Office sample packs so that I can learn some their techniques. The following is what I had to do to run the “Hello world  SharePoint-hosted” app and the result I got.

1. I run the above app by using Visual Studio 2013 update 3
2. Below is how the file looks like under the solution explorer. Make the necessary changes as suggested below and run it.

 

3. You will immediately be asked for Office 365 user name/password and later you see the “Do you trust Basic SharePoint-hosted?” app page as follows

4. Click Trust It button and you will see this result page

There was some warning while I deploy the app because the CDN url for jquery as was set as http not https. Change it to https and that will take care off the error.

Another note, is that as you uninstall and install the same app the GUID for appweb  appears to remain the same except the last letter in the GUID part changing sequentially up. 

If you go to my Office 365 tenant home page, https://sharepointcan.sharepoint.com, you see a link for the new SharePoint-hosted app listed under the Recent left navigation menu as well as created within the Apps in Testing custom list. The latter custom list captures the list of apps under test as well as their appweb url.

If you want to refer as to how this app is created please check the how to create a basic SharePoint-hosted app.

Now, I would like to deploy the app so that my users can start using it. How do I go about it. First make sure you deploy the app from VS 2013. Next we need to find a place where we can store the app. Options are either to SharePoint public store or your own organizational app catalog. I will create an app catalog by going into my Office 365 SharePoint Admin center. Check this how to deploying and installing apps for SharePoint: methods and options.

Go to your App catalog site collection and upload the .app file into the Apps for SharePoint document library.

 How to add an app

Go to any site where you would like to add this app (and a copy of the same app is not yet avilable) by clicking the gear icon a.k.a. site actions -> Add an app -> Click From Your Organization, from the left nav -> click the app -> Click Trust It button.

This will add the app into your site. When you click this newly created app, it send you to a different domain, as explained above, but same SP chrome setting.

That is it.