Salesforce DX Developer Guide

How Salesforce Developer Experience Changes the Way You Work
Use a Sample Repo to Get Started
Create an Application
Migrate or Import Existing Source
Enable Dev Hub Features in Your Org
Project Setup
Authorization
Metadata Coverage
Scratch Orgs
Sandboxes
Track Changes Between Your Project and Org
Development
Build and Release Your App
First-Generation Managed Packages
Second-Generation Managed Packages
Partner Licensing Platform (Developer Preview)
Unlocked Packages
Continuous Integration
Troubleshoot Salesforce DX
Limitations for Salesforce DX
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How Salesforce Developer Experience Changes the Way You Work

Salesforce Developer Experience (DX) is a new way to manage and develop apps on the Lightning Platform across their entire lifecycle. It brings together the best of the Lightning Platform to enable source-driven development, team collaboration with governance, and new levels of agility for custom app development on Salesforce.

Highlights of Salesforce DX include:

  • Your tools, your way. With Salesforce DX, you use the developer tools you already know.
  • The ability to apply best practices to software development. Source code and metadata exist outside of the org and provide more agility to develop Salesforce apps in a team environment. Instead of the org, your version control system is the source of truth.
  • A powerful command-line interface (CLI) removes the complexity of working with your Salesforce org for development, continuous integration, and delivery.
  • Flexible and configurable scratch orgs that you build for development and automated environments. This new type of org makes it easier to build your apps and packages.
  • You can use any IDE or text editor you want with the CLI and externalized source.
  • Salesforce Extensions for VS Code to accelerate app development. These tools provide features for working with scratch orgs, Apex, Lightning components, and Visualforce.

Are You Ready to Begin?

Here’s the basic order for doing your work using Salesforce DX. These workflows include the most common CLI commands. For all commands, see the Salesforce CLI Command Reference.

  • Install Salesforce CLI

    Salesforce CLI is a command-line interface that simplifies development and build automation when working with Salesforce. It’s a bundle of two executables: sf and sfdx. We first launched sfdx to provide you the ability to develop and test your apps more easily on Salesforce Platform. But if you want to work across all Salesforce clouds, sfdx doesn’t provide all the commands you need. With sf, we're bringing together a cross-cloud set of commands that streamline how you build and deploy across Salesforce.

    This developer guide uses the sfdx executable in all its examples. Some of the sfdx commands have sf equivalents. We encourage you to try them out! See Get Started with Salesforce CLI Unification for more information about the sf executable, such as how to install it, how you can use the two executables together, and a mapping between equivalent commands.

  • Enable Dev Hub
  • Use a Sample Repo to Get Started
  • Create an Application
  • Migrate or Import Existing Source