Ant Migration Tool Guide

Ant Migration Tool
Installing the Ant Migration Tool
Using the Ant Migration Tool
Entering Salesforce Connection Information
Constructing a Project Manifest
Specifying Named Components
Specifying all Components of a Type
Specifying Standard Objects
Getting Information About Metadata Types
Describing Metadata Types
Listing Components for a Metadata Type
Creating Retrieve Targets
Retrieving Metadata from a Salesforce Organization
Editing Metadata
Deleting Files from an Organization
Deploying Changes to a Salesforce Org
Checking the Status of a Task
Common Migration Issues
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Note: This release is in preview. Features described here don’t become generally available until the latest general availability date that Salesforce announces for this release. Before then, and where features are noted as beta, pilot, or developer preview, we can’t guarantee general availability within any particular time frame or at all. Make your purchase decisions only on the basis of generally available products and features.

Getting Information About Metadata Types

The Ant Migration Tool is retired with Spring ’24. The tool continues to function as-is for future API versions but isn’t updated with new functionality and isn’t supported.  If Salesforce adds a new feature that is incompatible with Ant, the Ant Migration Tool won't be updated to support it. To manage metadata changes, switch to Salesforce CLI for a modern, supported developer experience.

Note

You sometimes need to experiment with the composition of your package.xml manifest file before you settle on the final version that retrieves or deploys the metadata that you want. There are a couple of helper targets, <sf:describeMetadata> and <sf:listMetadata>, that are useful for gathering the relevant information during this experimentation period. The build.xml file specifies a series of commands to be executed by Ant. Within the build.xml file are named targets that process a series of commands when you run Ant with a target name.