Solving the "Tenant app deployment is only supported in the app catalog site." error

This post was most recently updated on December 12th, 2022.

2 min read.

I got an error stating that the “Tenant app deployment is only supported in the app catalog site. The current site is not the app catalog site.”, even if the current site very much IS an app catalog site? There might be an easy fix!

Problem

Table of Contents

Imagine this: you browse into your fresh SharePoint tenant, open the app catalog, click on an app, try to deploy it, and out comes this error.

Tenant app deployment is only supported in the app catalog site. The current site is not the app catalog site.

Yes, while trying to deploy an app from the app catalog, you get an error that the current site is not the app catalog site. Frustrating, and clearly untrue!

To be more precise, the error sometimes seems to occur immediately after you click “Deployment”, sometimes when you’re adding a site collection URL to deploy the app to, and sometimes only after clicking “Trust it” after accepting the deployment paths. According to my experiences so far, there’s one thing in common though – the app catalog has been freshly created, or at the very least not actually used earlier.

Solution

I’ve found 2 different solutions, the first of which is easy, the second is horrendous.

Easy solution: Grab some coffee and wait

It seems to me like this error usually pops up when you’re dealing with a freshly created app catalog. Most people probably do not run into this so often, but with all the debugging I’m doing daily, I see a lot of fresh tenants. Every now and then that leads to issues like this.

It still takes a while for the app catalog site collection to finish deployment, but Microsoft actually lets you access it quite fast. Chances are Microsoft is still provisioning different parts of the site even though you can access it, and it LOOKS LIKE it’s working.

So, the first solution is easy: wait. After an hour, it might start working. Chances are since it took you a while to google this page, it might work already!

Horrendous solution: do the redeployment dance

Okay, I hope you won’t even actually have to do this step, because it’s questionable at best.

If you keep getting the error after waiting for hours and hours, you might need to accept that the site has gone borked and you’ll need to recreate it. Before removing it, however, undeploy all of your apps, remove the manifest files, and delete the security principals for the apps – and only then remove the app catalog site. Removing the site is easy, but if you forget the cleanup steps, you might break some of your apps forever!

Then remove the app catalog site collection from the second-level Recycling Bin using PowerShell (sorry there’s no easier way to do this!)

After the cleanup, simply recreate the site, wait for a while, and try the deployment again. You should be good this time (although you might have to wait a while, too)!

Author
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Antti K. Koskela

Developer / Speaker / Consultant at Koskila / Precio Fishbone / Norppandalotti Software Co / Alter - Experience Ideas Ltd

Antti Koskela is a proud digital native nomadic millennial full stack developer (is that enough funny buzzwords? That's definitely enough funny buzzwords!), who works as Solutions Architect for Precio Fishbone, building delightful Digital Workplaces.

He's been a developer from 2004 (starting with PHP and Java), and he's been working on .NET projects, Azure, Office 365, SharePoint and a lot of other stuff. He's also Microsoft MVP for Azure.

This is his personal professional (e.g. professional, but definitely personal) blog.

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