tl;dr; You can use PCF Field Template and PCF Dataset Template to quickly create your new PCF Component in GitHub.

It is not an overstatement to say that there is still so much buzz around PCF components, even though there are no monthly announcements like canvas apps or Power Automate. Just look at the sheer number of components in pcf.gallery and you will be amazed by the creativity of the community.

To help people with creating new PCF components, you have Yeoman PCF Generator to do the scaffolding. Power Apps community is significantly lagging behind in using DevContainers, and believe me, by 2022, Dev Containers and GitHub Codespaces will become so common place, that we don’t blink an eyelid.

With that in mind, I thought it will good if I can move the scaffolding process entirely to GitHub rather than doing this locally. PCF CLI is not cross platform. This is the blocker at the moment for Codespaces, but that is being worked on.

There are two repos:

• PCF Field Template – https://github.com/rajyraman/pcf-template-field
• PCF Dataset Template – https://github.com/rajyraman/pcf-template-dataset

In order to create a new PCF Repo, just click the “Use this Template” button.

When you create a new repo from the template, use this convention “PCF-ComponentName-Component“. The important thing is to have hyphen in the repo name, otherwise you will have issues in scaffolding out the repo, and PCF CLI will throw an exception.

Your new repo will also have a GitHub workflow to build the component and release the solution. It can be run manually. It will also run automatically when you commit something the repo with a tag that begins with “v” e.g. v1.5. You can refer https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2/Git-Basics-Tagging for information on Git tags.

I hope this will help people creating new PCF Components.