Salesforce DX Developer Guide

Release Notes
How Salesforce Developer Experience Changes the Way You Work
Enable Dev Hub Features in Your Org
Project Setup
Sample Repository on GitHub
Create a Salesforce DX Project
Salesforce DX Project Structure and Source Format
How to Exclude Source When Syncing or Converting
Create a Salesforce DX Project from Existing Source
Retrieve Source from an Existing Managed Package
Retrieve Unpackaged Source Defined in a package.xml File
Convert the Metadata Source to Source Format
Salesforce DX Usernames and Orgs
Override or Add Definition File Options at the Command Line
Link a Namespace to a Dev Hub Org
Salesforce DX Project Configuration
Multiple Package Directories
Replace Strings in Code Before Deploying
Authorization
Metadata Coverage
Scratch Orgs
Sandboxes
Track Changes Between Your Project and Org
Development
Build and Release Your App
Create a First-Generation Managed Package using Salesforce DX
Second-Generation Managed Packages
Partner Licensing Platform (Developer Preview)
Unlocked Packages
Continuous Integration
Troubleshoot Salesforce DX
Limitations for Salesforce DX
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Convert the Metadata Source to Source Format

After you retrieve the source from your org, you can complete the configuration of your project and convert the metadata source to source format.

The convert command ignores all files that start with a “dot,” such as .DS_Store. To exclude more files from the convert process, add a .forceignore file.

  1. Convert metadata format to source format. Let’s say you created a directory called mdapi_project when you retrieved the metadata. 
    1sfdx force:mdapi:convert --rootdir mdapi_project --outputdir tmp_convert

    The --rootdir parameter is the name of the directory that contains the metadata source.

    If you don’t indicate an output directory with the --outputdir parameter, the converted source is stored in the default package directory indicated in the sfdx-project.json file. If the output directory is located outside of the project, you can indicate its location using an absolute path.

  2. To indicate which package directory is the default, update the sfdx-project.json file.
If there are two or more files with the same file name yet they contain different contents, the output directory contains duplicate files. Duplicate files can occur if you convert the same set of metadata more than once. The mdapi:convert process identifies these files with a .dup file extension. The source:push and source:pull commands ignore duplicate files, so you’ll want to resolve them. You have these options:
  • Choose which file to keep, then delete the duplicate.
  • Merge the files, then delete the other.

Next steps:

  • Authorize the Dev Hub org and set it as the default
  • Configure the Salesforce DX project
  • Create a scratch org