It’s been a year now since Lightning Components were Beta, just before Dreamforce 14. And as we like to do in Developer Relations, we’ve been doing everything we can to help developers adjust, adapt to, and adopt this exciting new UI technology. But there is an important change coming in Winter 16 that everyone should be aware of, especially those who have not yet perused the release notes. In order to run Lightning Components in your org, you will be required to use the My Domain feature.

Why the Change?

At Salesforce, Trust is our number one value. The security team that reviews all changes to the Force.com platform have determined that requiring of My Domain will allow Salesforce to enact even better security around Lightning Components.

And better security is good for everyone.

What is My Domain?

My Domain is a feature that allows you to add a personalized fourth-level domain to the actual URL of your org. At a minimum it allows a little bit of branding around your end users access to Salesforce. There are certain identity features that require My Domain in order to function.

To understand exactly what this means, look at your Salesforce org URL. A normal URL scheme for your Salesforce environment might use the following domain:

Let’s say you work for Buck’s Business Solutions and you want to use My Domain. You would choose a unique domain name like bucksbiz, then configure your Salesforce org to use it. Once enabled and activated your users would login as normal at login.salesforce.com, but once in the org they would only see the domain of your org as follows:

Note: if you’re using My Domains with Developer Edition, the characters “-dev-ed” are added the end of your chosen domain name. For example, I recently enabled My Domains on a Developer Edition  I’m working on and used the domain name “vault”. But my org fourth-level domain now says “vault-dev-ed”.

How This Impacts You

Hopefully, by now, you’ve built a Lightning Component, or two, even if only while going through the very cool Trailhead trail on Lightning Components, or at one of our DevZones at Dreamforce 15 or one of our regional World Tour events.

With Winter 16, once your org is upgraded, any Lightning Components you have previously created will only work if the My Domain feature is enabled. If you’ve never created Lightning Components in an org, when you attempt to do so, you will find that you won’t be able to until the My Domain feature is enabled.  The fix is quite simple, enable the My Domain feature, and it should all snap back into shape.

Turning Off My Domain

This change to your org is permanent and cannot be undone. When using a Developer Edition org, this is likely not a big deal. But if you have ever used any hard-coded URLs in any Visualforce, formulas, or integrations, those customizations may break.

If You’re Running Lightning Components Today in Production

In the run up to Winter 16, we made an effort to reach out to all orgs with Lightning Components in production. If you have not heard from us, please contact your Salesforce customer success representative or account executive.

Conclusion

Hopefully this blog post has made this change clear for you. Be sure to review the help topic on rolling out My Domain, and check over your code to make sure you haven’t hard-coded any URLs. As always, happy coding.