Generate a delta 🛆 of your Salesforce ☁️ metadata for deployment 🚀
Few releases ago, Salesforce ☁️ introduced the packaged-based 📦 approach (see second-generation packaging) for managing & deploying metadata, but unfortunately, many legacy projects 📁 are still using the unpackaged 🗃️ deployment.
The goal 🎯 of this article 📰 is to present an sfdx plugin 🧩 that simplifies the unpackaged deployment by generating a delta package of the modified metadata from the git commits history 📜
Why use a plugin to generate deltas 🔺
If you don’t use an sfdx plugin to generate a delta based on the git diff, that means you’ll have to do :
- Full deployment (SLOW ☹️): deploying all the tracked metadata takes time ⏱️ on each deployment and for a highly customized org there is a risk to hit the metadata API limits
- Manually select metadata (TEDIOUS ☹️): manually ✋ selecting the metadata takes time ⏱️ for your developers 💻, they have to prepare the package or package.xml in order to deploy only the modified metadata
Note 🗒️: in both cases, you have to prepare a destructive package in order to remove the deleted 🗑️ metadata, because otherwise you have to delete them manually in the target org
Introducing the “sfdx-mdt-plugin”
sfdx-mdt-plugin is a Salesforce ☁️ CLI plugin 🧩 that I’ve created and open-sourced 👐 on Github 🐙, It contains several commands ⚙️, but here will only focus on the git:delta command.
The mdt:git:delta uses the git diff to automatically detect the modified/deleted files in order to generate a :
- Delta 🔺 package that contains all the modified metadata
- Destructive 🗑️ package that contains the deleted metadata
the advantage of this command compared to the existing ones on github, is that mdt:git:delta support a deep 🔎 diff on the following complex metadata types
- Record Types
- Custom Labels
- Profiles
- Sharing Rules
- Assignment Rules
- Auto-Response Rules
- Matching Rules
- Translations
- Workflows
That means that for example, when you update 🖊️ just one access to a field in a profile 🎭, the delta file generated will contain the profile file 🧾 with the only updated field access
Install the sfdx-mdt-plugin 📥
Run the following command
sfdx plugins:install sfdx-mdt-pluginThe plugin is not digitally signed 🔑, click yes to continue 👌
How to use the plugin ⚙️
the command supports the following parameters
-f : (required) commit or branch name from which to do the diff
-t : commit or branch name to which to do the diff (default is HEAD)
-p : (required) folder name where to generate the delta package
-d : folder name where to generate the destructive package (will not be generated if not specified)
Run the following command to generate the deltas :
sfdx mdt:git:delta -f {fromCommit} -t {toCommit} -p {deltaPackagePath} -d {destructivePackagePath}
Then you can deploy the delta package using the following sfdx command
sfdx force:source:deploy -p {deltaPackagePath} -u {targetOrg}And the destructive package using this command
sfdx force:source:delete -r -p {destructivePackagePath} -u {targetOrg}Note : force:source:delete is not supported in production, you’ll need to convert the destructive package into metadata format and use the force:mdapi:deploy to deploy it
Disclaimer ⚠️: this sfdx plugin is just a piece of software 💾 that I’ve coded using my fingers ✋, all commanded by my brain 🧠 😅, so it can contain bugs 🐞, please report any issue in the GitHub 🐙 issue tab, thanks 👍
