How do I include registered steps when deploying CRM 2015 plugins?

Question

We're building a .NET plugin for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2015. Our deployment pipeline looks like this:

1. Compile, ilmerge and sign the plugin assembly
2. Use the PluginRegistration.exe tool from the CRM2015 SDK to register the signed plugin DLL and associated steps in our sandbox environment
3. Export the solution from the sandbox environment as a managed solution
4. Import the managed solution into the staging environment for testing and sign-off
5. Import the managed solution into the live environment

The problem is, when I import the managed solution, it picks up the entity customisations and the plugin assembly, but it doesn't pick up any registered steps - which means the only way to get it working on production is to point the PluginRegistration.exe tool at our production environment and manually registered the necessary workflow steps. We've managed to automate the rest of the deployment pipeline so we can drive it with TeamCity and Octopus, but this manual step registration is a tedious extra step that I'd like to eliminate.

Is there any way to include the registered steps when exporting/importing the managed solution?

Answer 1

I'm pretty sure that you've missed one really simple point - include your plugin's step to solution that you will export and that would make a trick.