Salesforce DX is now Generally Available!

I am incredibly proud and excited to announce that Salesforce DX is now Generally Available with the Winter ’18 Salesforce release!

This release follows an extremely successful Open Beta program that started last June, and we couldn’t have done it without your involvement and passion. Through the Open Beta, we saw you all:

Activate the Dev Hub on nearly 7,000 orgs.
Create over 50,000 scratch orgs.
Push source nearly 200,000 times.
Run close to 5,000,000 tests.

And what’s more, you came together as a new Salesforce DX group in the Trailblazer community, helping each other learn about the new tools and services. For that, thank you!

So what does it mean to “go GA” with Salesforce DX?

Try out the new tools

We have new tools we think you will quickly come to love and rely upon:

Salesforce CLI: The CLI is quickly becoming the go-to interface for interactive command line development, continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD), DevOps automation, and a broad foundation for enhanced tooling.

A simple invocation model enables developers to quickly move source code from version control to orgs, providing quick and easy ways to both develop through the Salesforce UI and quickly isolate and fix customer issues, all interactively right from a terminal window.
Scripting is at the heart of CI and CD. The scriptable nature of the CLI enables you to implement modern tools and patterns for software development and delivery, and perhaps even encourage you to adopt these approaches for the first time.
As a consolidated interface for many Salesforce APIs, the CLI has become the driver for our Visual Studio Code extensions. It is also what is now driving many of the features of third party tooling vendors, such as Illuminated Cloud and the Welkin Suite.

Scratch orgs: These new ephemeral environments are designed to enhance developer productivity, drive team collaboration, and facilitate automation as part of your development process.

Built directly from source, Scratch orgs are quick to create, use during development, and delete using the CLI when you’re done.
They can be configured with different org shapes (editions, features, permissions, etc.) and loaded with sample data.
Scratch orgs can be spun up to support automated testing as part of a CI process and then disposed of when testing is complete.

Language Services and Visual Studio Code: We are very excited to introduce a new set of extensions to run Salesforce DX on Visual Studio Code, and to support a broad set of new language services.

The open source extension pack for VS Code unlocks app dev on a flexible and familiar platform. Built on the Salesforce DX development model, this pack allows you to install just the extensions you need.
Our new language server for Apex supports features including code highlighting, code completion and outline views.
Completions for out-of-the-box tags has long been requested, and is now part of the new basic language server for Visualforce.

Source-driven development: it’s a movement!

As you know, we approached Salesforce DX with a principled perspective about how to write software. Everything is driven from source code, environments are easily created and disposable, and development is organized around team collaboration. We also focused on source-driven development and agile distribution, through the organization of your existing orgs and adoption of next generation packaging.

Yes, there’s a lot to Salesforce DX and this approach. Fortunately, it’s not an all-or-nothing proposition. Throughout the beta program, we’ve seen numerous customers and partners adopt pieces of Salesforce DX at the pace that feels right for them. Often it starts with the Salesforce CLI or with scratch orgs, replacing older tools and processes with new approaches. Sometimes we saw teams immediately jump fully into source-driven development, laying out a version control strategy that allowed their teams to work together more effectively. Watch this great webinar on Adopting Salesforce DX for more ideas.

The point is, it’s up to you on how to proceed. You can absolutely continue to manage software the way you do today and introduce new capabilities over time.

Pricing and Availability

With the General Availability of Salesforce DX, customers with Enterprise and Unlimited Edition will get an allocation of Scratch Orgs available in their Dev Hub; this is in addition to your existing Sandboxes. Similiarly, ISVs and SIs will get an allocation of Scratch Orgs in their Partner Business Org. To get started, enable the Dev hub in your org by searching for “Dev Hub” from Setup and then clicking Enabled. Additional Scratch Orgs can be purchased as an add-on, if needed.

To see your Scratch Org allocations, run the following command targetting your Dev Hub:

$ sfdx force:limits:api:display -u HubOrg

You’ll see the number of active scratch orgs through ActiveScratchOrgs. Remember, if you clean up after yourself and delete the scratch org when you’re done, it returns to your allocation.

Best of all, the remaining tools continue to be free!

Get started today

We are thrilled to deliver this first wave of tools to give the Salesforce developer — or citizen developer — more options for how they build on the Salesforce Platform. There’s a lot you can do to get started right now and join the movement!

Join us for a webinar, Getting Started with Salesforce DX , on Tuesday, October 24th.
Give us feedback or share your experience in the Salesforce DX group.
Earn your Salesforce DX Badge on Trailhead:

We are also excited to meet many of you at Dreamforce! There are over 30 sessions related to Salesforce DX and you can also visit us at our Developer Forest booth in the first floor of Moscone West. We recommend bookmarking these sessions:

From all of us on the Salesforce Platform team: we can’t wait to see what you build!

Published

By Wade Wegner

October 17, 2017

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