Principles

Utilize your Salesforce deployment knowhow

The tasks or commands should be easy to use. You don't need to resort to complex scripts to orchestrate a pipeline . A knowledge of what you need to achieve from a pipeline and salesforce deployment (such as DX, Unlocked Package/Org Based deployment model or a hybrid where you combine both*) should be enough to get you going.

We will also strive to provide sample pipelines to quickly get you started. Our azure pipelines extension is built with the classic (UI based) configuration in mind.

*If you need a refresh on Salesforce DX, Unlocked Packages or Org Based Deployment, checkout some of the available trailhead modules here​

Integrate with CI/CD platform wherever applicable

The native extensions provided by the project will integrate with CI/CD platform features wherever applicable, rather than providing our own dashboards/reports or rolling out features that break the platform conventions.

Easy to replace

sfpowerscripts will strive to keep the tasks as small as possible, thus enabling the pipeline author to replace tasks with ease. A pipeline author should be able to utilize any in place replacement for any tasks provided through the extension.

E.g.: sfpowerscripts provides a task to create a new version unlocked package, This task can be replaced by the following shell script

#assuming packageName is passed as the parameter
pkg_output=`sfdx force:package:version:create -p "$(packageName)" -x -w 180 --definitionfile config/project-scratch-def.json  --json`
​
 echo ${pkg_output}
  
  PACKAGE_STATUS=`echo ${pkg_output} | jq '.status' -r`
  if [ ${PACKAGE_STATUS} = "1" ]; then
    ERROR_TYPE=`echo ${pkg_output} | jq '.name' -r`
    echo Found $ERROR_TYPE
   if [ -z  ${ERROR_TYPE}]; then
      echo "Packaging failed"
      echo ${pkg_output} | python3 -m json.tool
      exit 1
    fi
  else
     echo "Successfull Packaging"
     echo ${pkg_output} | python3 -m json.tool
     PACKAGE_VERSION_ID=`echo ${pkg_output} | jq '.result.SubscriberPackageVersionId' -r`
     break
  fi
 # In a subsequent task either use the PAKAGE_VERSION_ID or write to a file as a build artifact

That being said we are monitoring the need for further use cases for higher level abstractions, such as a consolidated task executor command (Refer to Issue 68), such commands will always be optional and will not feature in the sample pipelines

Generate artifacts on build stage

sfpowerscripts (cli/azure pipelines) is built on the concept of generating artifacts for package creation tasks, unlocked or not, which then could be versioned, uploaded into an artifact provider or utilized in subsequent stages for deployment.

The following package creation commands shows this in action

• Create Source Package

• Create Unlocked Package

• Create Delta Package

These tasks should be invoked on a build stage when a feature branch merges into an integration branch. We also provide tasks such as 'Create Source Package' for projects which do not use an unlocked package to produce these artifacts.

These commands create an JSON based artifact with format <package-name>_artifact_metadata . We plan to extend this schema with more metadata as applicable in the future.

#sample artifact schema for unlocked package produced by Create Unlocked Package
​
{
  "package_name": "async-framework",
  "package_version_number": "0.1.0.80",
  "package_version_id": "04t1P000000IwtzQAC",
  "sourceVersion": "1815441c8196cadbc68cbf261b57e75165a8cd5d",
  "repository_url": "https://github.com/XXXXXX/yyyyyyyyy",
  "package_type": "unlocked",
  "test_coverage": 0,
  "has_passed_coverage_check": false,
}
​

The above JSON based schema is written to a file and is then treated as the build output a (In the case of azure pipelines, there are options build artifact) and could be uploaded to an artifact provider such as Azure Artifact.