Lightning Forms Modern – Installing Lightning Forms to SharePoint Online

Within this training video, you will learn how to install Lightning Forms into your SharePoint Online Tenant. To install modern Lightning Forms in SharePoint 2019 or SharePoint SE (i.e. on-premises SharePoint), please see Installing Lightning Forms in SharePoint 2019 – Lightning Tools.

Steps to installing Lightning Forms

To install Lightning Forms into your SharePoint Online Tenant, you will need to be at least a SharePoint Administrator, and also a Site Collection Admin of the tenant App Catalog site. Please follow these steps:

1. Download the Lightning Tools Lightning Forms Files.
   1. If you are planning on installing the trial version, please download Lightning Forms by completing the following online form: Download Here (Note: you will receive an email from Lightning Tools with the direct download link in the email).
   2. If you are an existing customer, you can download the latest release of Lightning Forms from here: Download Here
2. Extract the downloaded zip file and locate the LightningForms-Modern folder.
3. The LightningForms-Modern folder will contain a file called LightningForms-spfx-command-actions.sppkg.
4. Meanwhile, open a browser and navigate to your App Catalog. [The following steps are for the “classic” App Catalog; if you are using the modern App Management experience, please see the section below.] The url will typically be: https://[TenantName].sharepoint.com/sites/appcatalog/SitePages/Home.aspx
5. Within the AppCatalog site, please open the Apps for SharePoint library from the left-hand navigation pane.
6. Drag and drop the LightningForms-spfx-command-actions.sppkg file into the Apps for SharePoint library.

7. You will be prompted as to whether you trust the Lightning Forms. If you wish to use the product, please check the check box “Make this solution available to all sites in the organization” and click Deploy.

9. Congratulations, you have now installed Lightning Forms!

Installation using the modern App Management experience

Beginning from Step 4 above, if you are using the modern SharePoint App Management experience:

4. Open a browser and navigate to your App Catalog from your SharePoint Admin Center. This can be found under More Features in the left navigation, then Open the Apps tile. If this is the first time an app has been added in your environment, the App Catalog site collection will be automatically provisioned at this point.

5. In the modern App Catalog interface, click Upload and then browse to the extracted folder. Select the LightningForms-spfx-command-actions.sppkg file.

6. The Enable App panel will open on the right side. It will give you some information about the app, and allow you to choose how you wish to deploy the app (its availability). We recommend the default setting: Enable this app and add it to all sites. This will make Lightning Forms available to add to any site in your tenant. The other option (Only enable this app) will enable the app in the App Catalog, but if someone wishes to use Lightning Forms on a site, they will need to use SharePoint’s Add an App feature on that site, to add Lightning Forms there. In either case, click the Enable App button.

7. Next, a panel will appear that says “Approve access so this app works as designed”. This is because Lightning Forms takes advantage of several Microsoft Graph entities, and approval must be given by a Global or Application Admin to allow Lightning Forms to make requests to the Microsoft Graph. If you are a Global Admin, click Go to API access page. Otherwise, a Global Admin can come back and do the approvals later via the API access link on the left menu of the App Catalog.

8. This will take you to the API Access page, which normally takes a moment to load. You should eventually see a few  Pending permission requests by Lightning Forms. Note that you may see different requests than shown below, either because some of these permissions have already been approved, or because there have been changes to Lightning Forms since the time this article was written. You can view a current list of Lightning Forms API permission requests in this Knowledge Base article. The article also describes the purpose of each request; you may find that some are not necessary to approve if you don’t plan to use the relevant feature. 

9. Approve the appropriate Pending requests one by one; it’s not possible to approve them in bulk.

Congratulations, you have now installed Lightning Forms!

Updated September 1, 2023