Salesforce DX Developer Guide

How Salesforce Developer Experience Changes the Way You Work
Project Setup
Authorization
Scratch Orgs
Scratch Org Definition File
Scratch Org Definition Configuration Values
Create Scratch Orgs
Supported Metadata API Types
Salesforce DX Project Structure and Source File Format
Push Source to the Scratch Org
How to Exclude Source When Syncing or Converting
Assign a Permission Set
Ways to Add Data to Your Scratch Org
Pull Source from the Scratch Org to Your Project
Scratch Org Users
Manage Scratch Orgs from Dev Hub
Development
Build and Release Your App
Develop Packages (Beta)
Continuous Integration
Troubleshoot Salesforce DX
Limitations for Salesforce DX
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How to Exclude Source When Syncing or Converting

When syncing metadata between your local file system and a scratch org, you often have source files you want to exclude. Similarly, you often want to exclude certain files when converting source to Salesforce DX project format. In both cases, you can exclude individual files or all files in a specific directory with a .forceignore file.

Use your favorite text editor to create a .forceignore file to specify the files or directories you want to exclude. Any source file or directory that begins with a “dot,” such as .DS_Store, is excluded by default.

The .forceignore file excludes files when running force:source:push, force:source:pull, and force:source:status. For source:status, remote changes are checked against entries in the .forceignore file. Let’s say you added a class called HelloWorld.cls on the server and included an entry in .forceignore that matches the file name (such as HelloWorld.cls or HelloWorld.*). The source:status output omits the HelloWorld.cls.

Where to Put .forceignore

Be sure the paths you specify in .forceignore are relative to the directory containing the .forceignore file. For the .forceignore file to work its magic, you must put it in the proper location, depending on which command you are running.

  • Add the .forceignore file to the root of your project for force:source:push.
  • Add the file to the Metadata retrieve directory (with package.xml) for force:mdapi:convert.

Sample Syntax for .forceignore

The .forceignore file has similar functionality to .gitignore. Here are some options for indicating which source to exclude. In this example, all paths are relative to the project root directory. 

1# Specify a relative path to a directory from the project root
2helloWorld/main/default/classes
3
4# Specify a wildcard directory - any directory named “classes” is excluded
5**classes
6
7# Specify file extensions
8**.cls
9**.pdf
10
11# Specify a specific file
12helloWorld/main/default/HelloWorld.cls