Sideloading SharePoint Apps

When developing Apps for SharePoint it is essential to have a development site for testing your Apps. This can be done in several ways:

1. Provision a Developer site within an Office 365 tenant with an E plan
2. With an Visual Studio Premium or Ultimate MSDN subscription
3. Sign-up for a Developer Subscription
4. Create a site collection with a “Developer Site” on an on-premise install

If you have not used one of these approaches and try deploying an App from Visual Studio to a “non-Developer” site you will get the following error message:

Sideloading of apps is not enabled on this site

Sideloading is the process that is used when deploying an App directly from Visual Studio. The Developer site has the features enabled as part of the template but other sites need the Developer feature enabled.

For on-premise site the following line of PowerShell will enable the feature:

Enable-SPFeature e374875e-06b6-11e0-b0fa-57f5dfd72085 –url "http://SharePointLab.local";

For SharePoint Online the following article has a very good guide for enabling and then disabling the Developer feature:

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/officeapps/archive/2013/12/10/enable-app-sideloading-in-your-non-developer-site-collection.aspx