Glossary
Salesforce DevOps glossary
The terms that come up when a Salesforce team moves from change sets to version control, pipelines and automated deployments.
- Salesforce DevOps
- Salesforce DevOps is the practice of moving changes to a Salesforce org through version control, automated validation and repeatable deployments, instead of making them by hand in Production. It covers comparing environments, deploying metadata, pipelines, testing, backups and monitoring.
- Metadata
- Metadata is the configuration and code of a Salesforce org, such as Apex classes, custom objects and fields, flows, page layouts, profiles and permission sets. It is different from data, the records stored in the org. Metadata is what a deployment moves between orgs.
- Environment (org)
- An environment is one Salesforce org connected to a DevOps tool: a production org, a sandbox, a scratch org or a Developer Edition org. Metacaliper calls each connected org an environment.
- Sandbox
- A sandbox is a copy of a production org used for building and testing. Developer, Developer Pro, Partial Copy and Full sandboxes differ in how much data they hold. Changes made in a sandbox reach Production through a deployment.
- Scratch org
- A scratch org is a short-lived Salesforce org created from a definition file with Salesforce DX, used to build and test source in isolation. It expires after a set number of days.
- Metadata comparison
- A metadata comparison retrieves the same metadata from two sources, such as two orgs or an org and a git branch, and lists each component that was added, changed or exists only in the target, with the difference line by line. See Compare and deploy.
- Delta deployment
- A delta deployment sends only the components that differ between the source and the target, not the whole package or repository. It is faster and changes less in the target than a full deployment.
- Validation (check-only deployment)
- A validation runs a deployment and its tests against the target org without saving any change. It shows whether the deployment would succeed before anything is changed.
- Quick deploy
- Quick deploy is a Salesforce feature that deploys a validation that already passed with tests, without running the tests again. Salesforce allows it for 10 days after the validation.
- Test levels
- A test level sets which Apex tests a deployment runs: no tests, specified tests, local tests (the tests in the org, without managed packages) or all tests. Production deployments that include Apex need tests to pass with enough code coverage.
- Change set
- A change set is the Salesforce tool for sending metadata from one org to a related org, built by hand in Setup. Change sets do not use version control, cannot delete components and cannot be compared or rolled back, which is why teams move to DevOps tools.
- Salesforce DX source format
- Salesforce DX source format stores metadata in a git repository as small files per component, in the package directories named in sfdx-project.json. It makes changes easy to review and merge in pull requests.
- Pipeline
- A pipeline is the ordered path a change follows from a repository through each environment to Production, for example integration, QA, UAT and Production. Each stage pairs an environment with a branch. See Pipelines.
- Promotion
- A promotion moves selected changes into the next stage of a pipeline: it validates them against the stage environment, merges them into the stage branch and deploys them.
- Back-promotion
- Back-promotion carries a change that skipped stages, such as a hotfix made straight into Production, back into the earlier stages so that every environment stays in step. Metacaliper calls it Bring back.
- Hotfix
- A hotfix is an urgent change promoted directly into the last stage, usually Production, without passing through the earlier stages first.
- Release window and freeze
- A release window is the days and hours when deployments into a stage may run. A freeze is a period when no deployment may run, for example during a quarter close, unless an override is granted.
- Pull request validation
- Pull request validation checks each pull request against the environment it will be deployed to, and posts the result to the pull request, so a broken change is found before it is merged. See Source control.
- Rollback
- A rollback returns the components a deployment changed to their state before it ran, and removes the components it added. It needs a copy of those components taken before the deployment.
- Metadata backup (snapshot)
- A metadata backup, or snapshot, is a copy of an org’s metadata at one moment, taken on demand or on a schedule. Snapshots can be compared with each other and used to roll an org back. They do not include data records. See Snapshots and monitoring.
- Drift
- Drift is a change made directly in an org, outside the release process, so the org no longer matches its branch or its last snapshot. Drift is found by comparing the org with what it should contain.
- Setup Audit Trail
- The Setup Audit Trail is the Salesforce log of configuration changes made in Setup, with who made each change and when. Salesforce keeps it for 180 days.
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