Lifecycle and atk CLI

purpose

M365 Agents Toolkit lifecycle configuration (m365agents.yml) and full atk CLI command reference for provisioning, deploying, and managing M365 agents (declarative agents, custom engine agents, Teams bots/tabs/message extensions, Copilot connectors, Office add-ins).

rules

1. m365agents.yml is the lifecycle manifest. Every Agents Toolkit project has an m365agents.yml at the project root for dev/cloud deployment, and typically an m365agents.local.yml for local development. They define the provision, deploy, and publish lifecycle stages — each stage is an ordered list of actions. atk provision --env local runs m365agents.local.yml; atk provision --env dev runs m365agents.yml.
2. Lifecycle stages run in order: provision → deploy → publish. Provision creates cloud resources (Azure Bot, App Registration, resource groups). Deploy pushes app code to compute targets. Publish submits the app package to the Teams catalog.