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Use CLI for Microsoft 365 programmatically

Typically, you'll work with CLI for Microsoft 365 in a command line. You'll either call specific commands or build automation scripts to combine multiple tasks. But if you're building software, you might want to use CLI for Microsoft 365 from your code.

Integrate CLI for Microsoft 365 in your app​

If you build apps in Node.js, you can integrate CLI for Microsoft 365 using its API. This API lets you call any of the CLI's commands. The following examples show how you could call several CLI for Microsoft 365 commands in a Node.js app:

import { executeCommand } from '@pnp/cli-microsoft365';

try {
  // m365 status --output text
  const status = await executeCommand('status', { output: 'text' });

  if (status.stdout === 'Logged out') {
    // m365 login --output text
    await executeCommand('login', { output: 'text' }, {
      stdout: message => console.log(message)
    });
  }
  
  // m365 spo site list
  const siteList = await executeCommand('spo site list', {});
  const sites = JSON.parse(siteList.stdout);

  if (sites.length === 0) {
    throw new Error('No sites found');
  }
  
  const siteUrl = sites[0].Url;
  // m365 spo web get --webUrl https://contoso.sharepoint.com/sites/project-x --withGroups
  const siteInfo = await executeCommand('spo web get', { webUrl: siteUrl, withGroups: true });

  console.log(siteInfo.stdout);
  
} catch(err) {
  console.error(err);
}

You start with importing the executeCommand function from CLI for Microsoft 365. CLI doesn't expose all of its logic externally, but rather just the function that allows you to run CLI's commands. This could change in the future.

Next, you execute a command by passing the command's name without the m365 prefix, and its options. After the command completed its execution, it resolves a Promise with the command's output. The stdout property contains the main command output. The stderr property would contain verbose, debug and error output that in command line would be sent to stderr. The output in the Promise is a string in the format specified in the output option passed to executeCommand.

In some cases, like when calling the login command, you might need to get the command output while it executes. In the case of the login command, it will contain the instructions to complete the device login flow. You can get this output by passing to the executeCommand function a third argument with listeners attached to stdout and stderr output.

executeCommand('login', { output: 'text' }, {
  stdout: message => console.log(message)
});
info

You shouldn't use both listeners and output from Promises. All command output is sent to the registered listeners and exposed in the end through the resolved Promise. If you would send output from both the listener and Promise to the console, you'd end up with the same output printed twice. In the code sample above you see that for all commands you work with the output from Promises but for the login command you use a listener because you want to get login instructions while the command is still running.

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