Alternate way to develop extensions

Question

We are in process of developing a custom command set following this link and ended up in a road blocker as our organization is very strict on github usage. Downloading required components like phantom.js itself failed due to restrictions here and facing issues while setting up the dev environment.

My question, is there any other way to develop such extension without yeoman/gulp? Maybe a silly question but am having this challenge in my extended SP dev role in addition to my usual role.

Any pointer like articles or how-to may help me & others like me.

Answer 1

The link posted by you in the question is the official MS suggested approach to develop SPFx extensions. They themselves use this approach to develop certain stuff.

It relies on yeoman/gulp and npm packages. While theoretically there might be a way to develop extensions, since it is all JavaScript on the inside, you might end up re-inventing the wheel and it would not be a supported way for the future.

So, would suggest that you work with your organization and whitelist certain links which would be necessary for you to develop SPFx solutions,