SFDX: A New Way of Development

In Dreamforce Salesforce announce a new development tool SFDX. It’s a new way of development where we create a temporary org for the development; In SFDX we call them Scratch org. The idea is similar with Trailhead org where we create new org for challenge and once completed we can delete them as well. SFDX in Salesforce is game changer as we can use them with any size of teams.

With recent Salesforce releases we are getting updates related to SFDX and as its GA now so I did a quick check to see how it works and how we can best use it. The main part SFDX cover is related to Source control. With SFDX and many VCS (like github) we can easily do version control. SFDX is a command line tool but we can also use Visual studio plug-in to do the development. Today we will cover how we can quickly setup the SFDX up and running.

First you need a Dev Hub org. You can signup for a trial org from here. https://developer.salesforce.com/promotions/orgs/dx-signup

macOS	https://sfdc.co/sfdx_cli_osx
Windows 32-bit	https://sfdc.co/sfdx_cli_win
Windows 64-bit	https://sfdc.co/sfdx_cli_win64
Debian/Ubuntu 64	https://sfdc.co/sfdx_cli_linux Download the archive from one of the URLs in the manifest, extract the archive, then run the ./install script.
Debian/Ubuntu x86	https://sfdc.co/sfdx_cli_linux_x86

Then we can download CLI from here and we need to make sure we have properly installed it.

Then first we need to do login in our devhub org and authenticate the SFDX  to use that.

sfdx force:auth:web:login -d -a DevHub

You can create alias for org so that it is easy to remember and can quickly type them in CLI. We can use sfdx force:org:list  to see all active org.

First you need to create a local project where you will store all your metadata.

sfdx force:project:create -n MyOrg

Next we will create a new scratch org where we do all our development.

sfdx force:org:create -s -f config/project-scratch-def.json -a MyScratchOrg

• The -s option indicates that we want this scratch org to be the default org for this project.
• The -f option is the path to the project scratch org configuration file.

We can also export data using SFDX to populate our new org with data.

sfdx force:data:tree:export -q "SELECT Id,Name FROM Account" -d ./data

To Import this data we can use import command.

sfdx force:data:tree:import --sobjecttreefiles data/Account.json

We can also create classes, pages, lightning component using SFDX

sfdx force:apex:class:create -n AccountController -d force-app/main/default/classes
sfdx force:lightning:component:create -n AccountLocator -d force-app/main/default/aura

To Push and Pull data from,to scratch org we use Push and Pull commands.

sfdx force:source:pull
sfdx force:source:push

We can use sfdx force:org:open -u OrgAlias command to open any org in browser

To generate password for any scratch org we use the password generate command.

sfdx force:user:password:generate -u OrgAlias

We can also get list of all org using list command

sfdx force:org:list

To get current org details we can use org:display command.

sfdx force:org:display -u MyScratchOrg (OrgAlias)

So these all are basic steps using which we can easily configure SFDX in no time. In next post we will cover How we can use Git with SFDX and How we can use Visual Studio to develop the SFDX.

We can also use SFDX in Salesforce with non scratch org. You can check that in details here.

Did you like the post or want to add anything. Let me know in comments section. Happy Programming. 🙂