Salesforce DX is a modern tool for building Salesforce applications. It allows Salesforce developers to carry out source-driven development. In a source-driven development workflow, the source code can be kept in a version control system such as GitHub, Team Foundation Server (TFS), Subversion (SVN), or any other equivalent source control system. A developer can deploy the source code into a Salesforce instance, referred to as scratch Orgs, using commands provided by the Salesforce DX CLI. The CLI also provides commands to push the source code from your machine (referred to as local) to a Salesforce instance, create a Lightning Component Bundle, test Lightning Components, and many others. Source-driven development makes it easier for developers to work in a team and to adopt Continuous Integration (CI). CI automates the verification of builds (compiling code and making it ready for a production environment) and helps to detect regression bugs early. Throughout this book, we will be using the Salesforce DX CLI to push code to scratch Orgs and using GitHub as our version control system to manage our source code. This chapter covers the installation of the Salesforce DX CLI and various commands, and walks through a simple example of how to use Salesforce DX to build and test Lightning Components.

In this chapter, we will cover the following:

• Enabling the developer hub in your Salesforce organization
• Installing the Salesforce DX CLI
• Salesforce DX commands 
• Force Lightning namespace commands
• Force metadata API commands
• Installing the Visual Studio extension pack for DX
• Creating a Lightning Component using the Visual Studio extension pack for SFDX