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Chapter 2: The What and the How

This chapter explores the actual tools we are using in our example, the basic understanding needed for each tool, and an explanation of why we're doing things this way.

In short, our example relies on:

  • Git
    • A Git frontend if you are unused to Git - gitkraken is nice for Windows
  • Bitbucket
  • A good text editor (VSCode is fine, I prefer Sublime Text)
  • The SF command line
    • SFDMU, a SF command line extension
    • SGD, a SF command line extension
  • JIRA

You can completely use other tools if your project, your client, or your leadership want you do use other things.
The main reason we are using these in this example is that it relies on a tech stack that is very present with customers and widely used at a global level, while also leveraging reusable things as much as possible - technically speaking a lot of the configuration we do here is directly reusable in another pipeline provider, and the link to tickets is also something that can be integrated using another provider.

In short "use this, or something else if you know what you're doing".

So What are we using

The CLI

The first entrypoint into the pipeline is going to be the Salesforce Command Line.You can download it here.
If you want a graphical user interface, you should set up VSCode, which you can do by following this Trailhead. You can start using the CLI directly via the terminal if you already know what you're doing otherwise.

We'll be using the Salesforce CLI to:

  • login to organizations, and avoid that pesky MFA;
  • pull changes from an organization once our config is done;
  • rarely, push hotfixes to a UAT org.

For some roles, mainly architects and developers, we will also use it to:

  • validate deploys to specific orgs in cases of hotfixes;
  • setup SGD jobs in cases of commit-based deploys or destructive changes;
  • setup SFDMU jobs for any data-based transfers.
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