Generate the sfdx content in source format and destructive change from two git commits.

SFDX-Git-Delta (*a.k.a. SGD*) helps Salesforce Architects and Developers accomplish 2 things with their source deployments:

1. Make deployments faster, by identifying the metadata that has been changed since a reference commit.
2. Automate destructive deployments, by listing the deleted (or renamed) metadata in a destructiveChanges.xml

To get a better understanding of what SGD is for, take a look at this post on the Salesforce Developers Blog: Optimizing Unpackaged Deployments Using a Delta Generation Tool.

If you are not a Salesforce Architect or Developer, probably not, sorry.

If you are a Technical Architect or Developer, then it’s a very useful tool for you, when the 3 conditions below are met:

Your Salesforce project uses a git repo as the source of truth.
        ➕
You use the Source (DX) format in the repo.
        ➕
Your metadata is not packaged (in other words, your repo contains all the unmanaged metadata of the project).

SGD is designed to be part of a CI/CD pipeline (Jenkins, Bitbucket Pipelines, GitLab CI, GitHub Actions, Azure DevOps...) that handles the deployment of the sources to the Salesforce org(s).

Pro tips: If you are in the process of building your CI/CD pipeline, make sure you already have a fully functionnal pipeline before implementing delta deployments (otherwise it will just make it harder to debug your pipeline). It's also important to implement a bypass in your pipeline, to have to hability to fallback to full deployment in case the delta deployement is not behaving the way you expected it.

DISCLAIMER:

⚠️ SFDX-Git-Delta is NOT an officially supported tool ⚠️

👷 Use it at your own risk, wear a helmet, and test it first before adding it to your pipeline 🔥

You can use SGD as a Salesforce CLI plugin (sfdx sgd:source:delta), and this is now the recommended approach to get SGD:

sfdx plugins:install sfdx-git-delta

Because this plugin is not signed, you will get a warning saying that "This plugin is not digitally signed and its authenticity cannot be verified". This is expected, and you will have to answer y (yes) to proceed with the installation.

If you run your CI/CD jobs inside a Docker image, you can add the plugin to your image. Here is an example of a Dockerfile including the SGD plugin: https://github.com/mehdisfdc/sfdx-cli-gitlab

To view the full list and description of the sgd options, run sfdx sgd:source:delta --help

-t, --to [sha] commit sha to where the diff is done [HEAD] (default: "HEAD")
-f, --from [sha] commit sha from where the diff is done [git rev-list —max-parents=0 HEAD]
-o, --output [dir] source package specific output [./output] (default: "./output")
-a, --api-version [version] salesforce API version [50] (default: "50")
-i, --ignore specify the ignore file (default: ".forceignore")
-D, --ignore-destructive specify the ignore file (default: ".forceignore")
-r, --repo [dir] git repository location [.] (default: ".")
-d, --generate-delta generate delta files in [./output] folder
-h, --help output usage information

Before the Salesforce CLI plugin was available, the old way to use this tool was through the sgd command (as described in the old README). It is now recommended to use sfdx sgd:source:delta, but if you feel nostalgic about the sgd command, you can still get it through yarn (or npm): yarn sfdx-git-delta@latest -g

Works in Unix like system. Windows is not tested.

Git command line is required on the system where the command line is running.

Node v14.6.0 or above is required. To make sure that the Salesforce CLI is using the expected node version for SGD, run sfdx --version before attempting to install the SGD plugin: if you see a node version below v14.6.0 in the output, you'll need to fix it first. If you encounter this issue while having installed the correct version of node on your system, try to install the Salesforce CLI via npm (npm install sfdx-cli --global) rather than with another installer.

sfdx sgd:source:delta --to HEAD --from HEAD^ --output .

echo "--- package.xml generated with added and modified metadata ---"
cat package/package.xml
echo
echo "---- Deploying added and modified metadata ----"
sfdx force:source:deploy -x package/package.xml

echo "--- destructiveChanges.xml generated with deleted metadata ---"
cat destructiveChanges/destructiveChanges.xml
echo
echo "--- Deleting removed metadata ---"
sfdx force:mdapi:deploy -d destructiveChanges --ignorewarnings

If you run SGD on a Windows system, make sure to use double quotes to prevent the parameters from being interpreted by the terminal:

sfdx sgd:source:delta --to "HEAD" --from "HEAD^" --output .

Let’s take a look at the following scenario:

The CI pipelines deploys the sources to Production anytime there is a new commit in the master branch.

In our example, the latest commit to master is composed of:

• Apex Class added: TriggerHandler
• Apex Class added: TriggerHandler_Test
• Apex Class modified: TestDataFactory
• Apex Class deleted: AnotherTriggerFramework

In this situation, we would expect the CI pipeline to:

1. Deploy to Production only 3 classes (no matter how much metadata is present in the force-app folder): TriggerHandler, TriggerHandler_Test, and TestDataFactory
2. Delete from Production 1 classe: AnotherTriggerFramework

So let’s do it!

From the project repo folder, the CI pipeline will run the following command:

sfdx sgd:source:delta --to HEAD --from HEAD^ --output .

which means:

Analyze the difference between HEAD (latest commit) and HEAD^ (previous commit), and output the result in the current folder.

The sfdx sgd:source:delta command produces 2 usefull artifacts:

1) A package.xml file, inside a package folder. This package.xml file contains only the metadata that has been added and changed, and that needs to be deployed in the target org.

Content of the package.xml file in our scenario:

2) A destructiveChanges.xml file, inside a destructiveChanges folder. This destructiveChanges.xml file contains only the metadata that has been removed or renamed, and that needs to be deleted from the target org. Note: the destructiveChanges folder also contains a minimal package.xml file because deploying destructive changes requires a package.xml (even an empty one) in the payload.

Content of the destructiveChanges.xml file in our scenario:

In addition, we also could have generated a copy of the force-app folder with only the added and changed metadata, by using the --generate-delta (-d) option (more on that later).

The CI pipeline can use the package/package.xml file to deploy only this subset of metadata:

echo "--- package.xml generated with added and modified metadata ---"
cat package/package.xml
echo
echo "---- Deploying added and modified metadata ----"
sfdx force:source:deploy -x package/package.xml

The CI pipeline can use the destructiveChanges folder to deploy the corresponding destructive change:

echo "--- destructiveChanges.xml generated with deleted metadata ---"
cat destructiveChanges/destructiveChanges.xml
echo
echo "--- Deleting removed metadata ---"
sfdx force:mdapi:deploy -d destructiveChanges --ignorewarnings

And voilà! 🥳

SGD works with any git sha pointer: commit sha, branch, tag, git expression (HEAD, etc.).

Here are 3 examples showing how you can compare the content of different branches:

1) Comparing between commits in different branches For example, if you have commit fbc3ade6 in branch develop and commit 61f235b1 in branch master:

sfdx sgd:source:delta --to fbc3ade6 --from 61f235b1 --output .

2) Comparing branches (all changes) Comparing all changes between the develop branch and the master branch:

sfdx sgd:source:delta --to develop --from master --output .

3) Comparing branches (from a common ancestor) Comparing changes performed in the develop branch since its common ancestor with the master branch (i.e. ignoring the changes performed in the master branch after develop was created):

sfdx sgd:source:delta --to develop --from $(git merge-base develop master) --output .

Using a package.xml file to deploy a subset of the metadata is propably the simpliest approach to delta deployments. But there are some situations where you may want to have the actual source files related to all the components that have been changed recently.

One example is to speed up object deployments: the package.xml approach will result on the entire sub-folder for a given object to be deployed. On the opposite, having a copy of the actual sources added/modified allows you to chirchugically deploy only the modified components.

This is where the --generate-delta (-d) option comes handy!

Let's use this option with our previous example:

mkdir changed-sources
sfdx sgd:source:delta --to HEAD --from HEAD^ --output changed-sources/ --generate-delta

In addition to the package and destructiveChanges folders, the sfdx sgd:source:delta command will also produce a copy of the added/changed files in the ouput folder.

Content of the output folder when using the --generate-delta option, with the same scenario as above:

The --ignore [-i] parameter allows you to specify an ignore file used to filter the element on the diff to ignore. Every diff line matching the pattern from the ignore file specified in the --ignore [-i] will be ignored by SGD, and will not be used to add member in package.xml nor destructiveChanges.xml (and will also be ignored when using the --delta-generate parameter).

But, sometimes you may need to have two different ignore policies for generating the package.xml and destructiveChanges.xml files. This is where the --ignore-destructive [-D] option comes handy!

Use the --ignore-destructive parameter to specify a dedicated ignore file to handle deletions (resulting in metadata listed in the destructiveChanges.xml output). In orther words, this will override the --ignore [-i] parameter for deleted items.

For example, consider a repository containing multiple sub-folders (force-app/main,force-app/sample, etc) and a commit deleting the Custom__c object from one folder and modifying the Custom__c object from another folder. This event will be treated has a Modification and a Deletion. By default, the Custom__c object would appear in the package.xml and in destructiveChanges.xml, which could be a little bit inconsistent and can break the CI/CD build. This is a situation where your may want to use the --ignore-destructive [-D] parameter! Add the Custom__c object pattern in an ignore file and pass it in the CLI parameter:

# destructiveignore
*Custom\_\_c.object-meta.xml

$ sfdx sgd:source:delta --from commit --ignore-destructive destructiveignore

Note that in a situation where only the --ignore [-i] parameter is specified (and --ignore-destructive [-D] is not specified), then the plugin will ignore items matching --ignore [-i] parameter in all situations: Addition, Modification and Deletion.

Depending on your testing strategy, you may be interested in generating a a comma-separated list of the added and modified Apex classes (to use in the sfdx force:source:deploy --testlevel RunSpecifiedTests command, for example).

To cover this requirement, you can use a tool such as yq to parse the content of the package.xml file produced by SGD:

xq . < package/package.xml | jq '.Package.types | if type=="array" then .[] else . end | select(.name=="ApexClass") | .members | join(",")'

const sgd = require('sfdx-git-delta')

const work = sgd({
  to: '', // commit sha to where the diff is done. Default : HEAD
  from: '', // commit sha from where the diff is done. Default : git rev-list --max-parents=0 HEAD
  output: '', // source package specific output. Default : ./output
  apiVersion: '', // salesforce API version. Default : 46
  repo: '', // git repository location. Default : ./repo
})

console.log(JSON.stringify(work))
/* {
 *   config: config,
 *   diffs: { package: {...}, destructiveChanges: {...} },
 *   warnings: []
 * }
 */

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SemVer is used for versioning.

• Sebastien Colladon - Developer - scolladon
• Mehdi Cherfaoui - Tester - mehdisfdc

Contributions are what make the trailblazer community such an amazing place. I regard this component as a way to inspire and learn from others. Any contributions you make are greatly appreciated.

See contributing.md for sgd contribution principles.

This project is licensed under the MIT License - see the LICENSE.md file for details