Setup modern Salesforce release management in 5 minutes.

No Jenkins, no ant scripts, no installations needed.

Salesforce source control and release management is often seen as something complex, heavy and cumbersome. Adopting CI/CD generally requires your team to be highly technical not only within the Salesforce domain but also in the dev-ops space, think Jenkins, Ant Script, CLI, Git Integration, API version management, …

But it doesn’t have to be that way …

In this blog post, we’ll show you how to go from zero to full scale, modern release management using ClickDeploy Enterprise, all in less than 5 minutes.

No code. No Ant Scripts. No Jenkins. No installations needed.

If you prefer to watch a video tutorial instead, you can view it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uu3j5o-dP0E

Process

ClickDeploy.io is super flexible and you can setup any workflows you could imagine. In this blog, we will set up a process that looks like below.

A few things to note in the process above:

• GitHub is the source of truth of your production’s metadata. This enables version control, history tracking, code review, approval, audit, compliance, rollback and preventing code clobbering.
• ClickDeploy Daily CI job deploys metadata from GitHub to production. Making this daily allows your team to establish a predictable, frequent release schedule. It also enforces GitHub be the source of truth and systematically prevent attempts to make changes directly in production.
• Admins and developers would move changes from dev sandboxes to GitHub instead of moving changes directly to production like they used to with Change Sets.
• ClickDeploy Declarative Git Flow allows your less technical admins to move changes to GitHub in a few clicks without spending hours on editing XML, fiddling with ANT scripts or learning Git.

Implement This Process

What you need

• For demonstration purpose, we will use two Salesforce Developer Edition orgs, one acts as Dev environment and the other acts as Production environment. Sign up Developer Edition orgs for free via https://developer.salesforce.com/signup
• An empty GitHub repository.
• A free ClickDeploy.io account. There is no needs to purchase anything yet. Your enterprise trial is activated automatically.

Step 1: Add GitHub repo to ClickDeploy.io

In ClickDeploy.io, add a new organization of type GitHub and proceed with authorization, like below:

After you’ve added the GitHub org and the 2 Salesforce orgs that you signed up in Step 1, your org list would look like below.

For demo purpose, we call the 2 Salesforce orgs “Dev Org” and “Production” even though these are just Developer Edition orgs.

Step 2: Initialize your GitHub repository

We want to populate your empty GitHub repository with whatever in your production org. To do this, create a new Deployment, like this:

Select the types of metadata you want to track in your GitHub repo using Wildcard type, like this:

Use the Group filter to help you decide what to track. Code Related and Object Related is a good place to start. You can add other types later.

Hit Commit to Git Branch and ClickDeploy will commit the selected metadata to the target git branch.

Click Review Changes to see the metadata differences. Since your repo was empty, you’ll see a list of newly added files. In GitHub, create a pull request then merge to master. After which, your master branch in GitHub should look like below. By convention, ClickDeploy stores your metadata source in a folder named project .

Step 3: Setup your first CI Job

Your GitHub repo is now the source of truth. Create a CI job to do a daily deployment from GitHub to Production, like this:

Most teams prefer not to deploy on Friday in order to free team members from release support over the weekend. Such flexible scheduling requirement can be easily configured as above. Once the CI job is saved, select a deployment strategy to tell ClickDeploy how to deploy from Git. ClickDeploy supports a wide variety of deployment strategies including selective, all or incremental. In this example, we elect to deploy all git source by configuring “git source” deploy option and add “All Git Source” wildcard as below.

If you get this far, congratulations, you’ve just completed your first CI process. Let’s recap. You started by linking your GitHub repo with ClickDeploy.io. You then populated the repo with your production metadata. In the last step, you scheduled a daily job that deploys from your GitHub repo to your production org.

Now that you have source control and a CI process in place. Let’s find out how ClickDeploy can empower your team to work with Git effortlessly.