SharePoint Online – Tenant app catalog vs Site Collection app catalog

Today we are going to see the difference between Tenant app catalog vs Site Collection app catalog.

What is Tenant appcatalog?

A constant centrally located SharePoint online site utilized to deploy all add-ins and SPFx solutions with Tenant administrant consents.

The solutions located here will be accessible for all site collections across the company and each site collection administrants can add them to their site collection.

Example: Solutions like unchanging Footer for all site collections, also deploy your SPFx footer extension to this tenant app catalog.

beforehand this app catalog was fluently findable in the navigation, but after SharePoint admin center site ultramodern look it’s hidden under “ More features” –> “ Apps”.

And if you don’t have one you can create a tenant app catalog from this screen.

What is Site collection appcatalog?

This new app catalog allows us site collection administrants to plant solutions at a site collection level. Similar deployed solutions won’t be available

But it’s good to get tenant admin permission & review, indeed though its site collection.

Example: Solutions like a web part created for HR site, also deploy your SPFx web part into your HR Site collection app catalog.

But this site collection app catalog won’t be available by default, tenant administrant must generate this using the below PnP PowerShell commands.

Connect-PnPOnline -Url https://<tenant>-admin.sharepoint.com -UseWebLogin

Add-PnPSiteCollectionAppCatalog -site https://contoso.sharepoint.com/sites/marketing

Note: Site is the target site collection where you want to create app catalog

Once this appcatalog is created you could see a list titled “ App for SharePoint” is created inside your site collection

So, way to go for site collection restricted solutions, and site collection administrators can manage it.

How to remove site collection app catalog?

We can remove the site collection app catalog by using the below PnP PowerShell script.

Remove-PnPSiteCollectionAppCatalog -site https://contoso.sharepoint.com/sites/marketing

But indeed after you remove it the library will be still available, don’t worry you can’t be able to deploy anything it’ll give this error.

Governance:

Indeed though site collection administrators manage their own site collection level app catalog, as part of governance a tenant admin needs a way to see them. Yes, there’s a secret list in the tenant app catalog, here’s the URL

https://<tenant-app-catalog-URL>/Lists/SiteCollectionAppCatalogs/AllItems.aspx

Thanks for reading, this is the major differance between Tenant app catalog vs Site Collection app catalog. You can read more articles at sharepointgems.