DevOps for Salesforce

Build, test, and streamline data pipelines to simplify development in Salesforce

Priyanka Dive, Nagraj Gornalli

• Publisher: Packt Publishing
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9781788833349
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781788836548
• Topic: Computer Science
• Subtopic: Business Intelligence
• Index: Computer Science

Implement DevOps for Salesforce and explore its features

Key Features

• Learn DevOps principles and techniques for enterprise operations in Salesforce
• Implement Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery using tools such as Jenkins and Ant script
• Use the Force.com Migration Tool and Git to achieve versioning in Salesforce

Book Description

Salesforce is one of the top CRM tools used these days, and with its immense functionalities and features, it eases the functioning of an enterprise in various areas of sales, marketing, and finance, among others. Deploying Salesforce applications is a tricky event, and it can get quite taxing for admins and consultants. This book addresses all the problems that you might encounter while trying to deploy your applications and shows you how to resort to DevOps to take these challenges head on.

Beginning with an overview of the development and delivery process of a Salesforce app, DevOps for Salesforce covers various types of sandboxing and helps you understand when to choose which type. You will then see how different it is to deploy with Salesforce as compared to deploying with another app. You will learn how to leverage a migration tool and automate deployment using the latest and most popular tools in the ecosystem. This book explores topics such as version control and DevOps techniques such as Continuous Integration, Continuous Delivery, and testing. Finally, the book will conclude by showing you how to track bugs in your application changes using monitoring tools and how to quantify your productivity and ROI.

By the end of the book, you will have acquired skills to create, test, and effectively deploy your applications by leveraging the features of DevOps.

What you will learn

• Implement DevOps for Salesforce and understand the benefits it offers
• Abstract the features of Force.com MigrationTool to migrate and retrieve metadata
• Develop your own CI/CD Pipeline for Salesforce project
• Use Qualitia to perform scriptless automation for Continuous Testing
• Track application changes using Bugzilla
• Apply Salesforce best practices to implement DevOps

Who this book is for

If you are a Salesforce developer, consultant, or manager who wants to learn DevOps tools and set up pipelines for small as well as large Salesforce projects, this book is for you.

Version Control

In the previous chapter, we looked at the Force.com migration tool. We went through a step-by-step procedure for setting up Force.com or the Ant migration tool on a Windows and Linux machine, studied the files that are required to retrieve metadata from a sandbox, and how to provide credentials to access a sandbox. We looked at the procedure to deploy metadata on sandboxes and discussed how Force.com helps developers and DevOps in everyday life.

In this chapter, we will study the source code versioning system and its types. We will mainly focus on Git distributed version control, and operations performed on the Git repository, such as commit, push, merge, and so on. We will also go through the step-by-step procedure for setting up our own GitLab server, adding a repository, adding users, and creating a branch. We will discuss Git branching strategies and protecting branches. Finally, we will learn how to use Git with a Salesforce project and how to save Salesforce metadata to Git.

What is meant by SCVS?

Source Code Versioning System (SCVS) as the name indicates, it helps to manage source code changes over time. There are many source control versioning systems available such as CVS, SVN, Git, and so on. Version control maintains the history of every file change, and helps developers to track changes in an application. The main reasons behind having a version control system are to be able track changes in an application and to be able to revert back if something goes wrong. As code undergoes various changes, version control helps us to maintain a working version of code, and with the help of versioning, we can also maintain different environments such as testing, staging, and production. Multiple users can work on the same application source code simultaneously using version control.

There are two varieties of version control, centralized and distributed. In centralized version control, there is one central repository where each user gets their own working copy. If anyone commits their changes to the source control system, other co-users can get those changes by updating their working copy. Subversion and CVS are centralized version systems.

In distributed version control, each user gets a local repository and working copy. Changes made by the user are saved in their local repository when they commit code. Co-users can get those changes when the user pushes the changes to the remote repository.

Version control in Salesforce

Salesforce has a limited audit capability to track changes in a sandbox. Making changes in the production environment is risky, and we are not able to see versions of files or track changes in a sandbox.

Reverting code in Salesforce is a very difficult task if we don't have version control in place.

Why doesn't Salesforce provide its own version control? Salesforce was basically designed for users to get their application running on the cloud without much understanding of the code. We can build small applications in Salesforce with just clicks, so Salesforce didn't focus on having version control. In Salesforce, we can modify the Salesforce organization in place so we don't need to have code on a local machine.

Mostly people working on Salesforce think that there is lot of work involved in setting up version control for Salesforce, which is only required if we have large teams. To set up version control for Salesforce projects, developers and administrators need to learn how to use version control systems, and they might need some knowledge of the command-line instructions involved. But we have many integrations of Git where we don't need to know about commands as we can use buttons or tabs instead.

As we have mentioned here, Salesforce does not provide any in-built version control, so we need to set up a source code version control system. There are many version control systems, but the most popular version control system is Git. In the following section, we will go through the GitLab setup and using Git in a Salesforce project.

Introduction to Git

Git is a commonly used version control system invented by Linus Torvalds. It is a distribute...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright and Credits
• Packt Upsell
• Contributors
• Preface
• Salesforce Development and Delivery Process
• Applying DevOps to Salesforce Applications
• Deployment in Salesforce
• Introduction to the Force.com Migration Tool
• Version Control
• Continuous Integration
• Continuous Testing
• Tracking Application Changes and the ROI of Applying DevOps to Salesforce
• Other Books You May Enjoy