Deploy a single feature using SharePoint Management Shell with SharePoint 2013

Question

I have been working in a development environment and deploying my custom web part features from Visual Studio directly by just hitting F5. I now need a way to deploy features separately to a test environment and would like to know the best way to go about this. I know there is an "Install-SPFeature" command but it seems to require a feature.xml file. In my Visual Studio project I have a .feature file and a .template.xml file but no plain feature.xml file. How do I generate this feature.xml file to use the Install-SPFeature command or is there an even better way to deploy single features to a site?

Answer 1

You need the .wsp file that contains the features. You can create with Visual Studio by right clicking the Project and hit on Publish option. First af all, open a SharePoint Management Shell. You have to add the Solution to SharePoint with this command:

Add-SPSolution -LiteralPath $SolutionPath

Then, install the solution:

$Url = "http://urltoinstall"
$SolutionToInstall = Get-SPSolution -Identity "yourSolutionName.wsp"
Install-SPSolution -Identity $SolutionToInstall -WebApplication $Url -GACDeployment -Force

Remove the -WebApplication parameter if you want deploy globally.

Finally install the feature you want with this command

$FeatureName = "YourFeatureName"
Install-SPFeature $FeatureName -Force
$FeatureActivate = Get-SPFeature $FeatureName
Enable-SPFeature -Identity $FeatureName -Url $Url -Force

Hope this solves your question