Salesforce DX Setup Guide

 The Salesforce Developer Experience (DX) is a set of tools that streamlines the entire development lifecycle. It improves team development and collaboration, facilitates automated testing and continuous integration, and makes the release cycle more efficient and agile.

Advantages of Salesforce DX

·         It helps improve team collaboration and development

·         It makes the release cycle process more agile and efficient

·         It allows developers to use any tool to modify the code such as CLI, VIM, Sublime, Atom, etc.

·         Facilitates automated testing for your code and enables continuous integration

·         Requires a local development setup for developers to get hands-on expertise

Components of Salesforce DX:

·         VS Code: Visual Studio Code is the go-to code editor for Salesforce developers. It’s free, open-source, and available for Windows, Linux, and macOS. This editor has easy-to-install extensions for syntax highlighting, code completion, and more.

·         Salesforce CLI (command-line interfaces): The Salesforce CLI is a powerful command-line interface that simplifies development and builds automation when working with your Salesforce org. Use it to aggregate all the tools you need to develop with and perform commands against your Salesforce org. Synchronize source to and from scratch orgs.

·         Extensions in VS Code: The features that Visual Studio Code includes out-of-the-box are just the start. VS Code extensions let you add languages, debuggers, and tools to your installation to support your development workflow. VS Code’s rich extensibility model lets extension authors plug directly into the VS Code UI and contribute functionality through the same APIs used by VS Code. 

The Salesforce Extension pack includes tools for developing on the Salesforce platform in the lightweight, extensible VS Code editor. These tools provide features for working with development orgs (scratch orgs, sandboxes, and DE orgs), Apex, Aura components, and Visualforce.

Setup Dx Environment:

Install the CLI on Windows

You install the Salesforce CLI on Windows with an .exe file.

Download and run the Windows installer.

 Verify your Installation:

Run this command to verify the Salesforce CLI version:

Sfdx –version

 Run this command to verify the Salesforce CLI plug-in version:

sfdx plugins –core

 

This command returns a list of the other plug-ins installed in the CLI:

Sfdx plugins

Download and Install VS Code:

VS code can be downloaded from the below link.

https://code.visualstudio.com

Setup Salesforce DX with VS Code

Step 1: To setup Saleforce in VS Code, first install “Salesforce Extension Pack”.

Step 2: To go for a Lightning Web Component in VS Code, first you need to install “Lightning Web Components”.

These are the steps required to set up and configure Salesforce DX on your system.

Create a Salesforce DX Project via Command Palette

·         In Visual Studio Code, open the Command Palette by pressing Ctrl+Shift+P on Windows or Cmd+Shift+P on macOS

·         Type SFDX

·         Select SFDX: Create Project

·         Enter HelloWorldLightningWebComponent as the project name

·         Press Enter

·         Select a folder to store the project

·         Click Create Project. You should see something like this as your base setup:

Authorize Your Non-DevHub Org via Command Palette

·         In Visual Studio Code, open the Command Palette by pressing Ctrl+Shift+P on Windows or Cmd+Shift+P on macOS

·         Type SFDX

·         Select SFDX: Authorize an Org

·         Select the login option accordingly. Select login.salesforce.com to log into your developer org or select test.salesforce.com to log in to the sandbox. You can also use a custom domain URL to log in.

·         Log in using your org.

·         If prompted to allow access, click Allow.

·         After you authenticate in the browser, the CLI remembers your credentials. The success message should look like this:

 Points to Remember:

1. Make sure that you have installed Java 8 or Java 11 and configure the path on your system.
2. If you are not able to retrieve or deploy components and you’re getting “UNSUPPORTED_API_VERSION: Invalid Api version specified on URL” message, then execute the following command: “sfdx force:config:set apiVersion=48.0” and select the previous version in it.