Writing code isn't quite half the battle; there's testing your code and finally, deployment, that is, moving your code from your sandbox or developer org to your production org. Over the years, Salesforce has added tools and methods to move your metadata, including code between orgs. We'll start with the oldest, most venerable tool and work through all three methods of deploying code to production. Throughout this tour of deployment options, we'll discuss the types of metadata that are not deployable via these methods. Specifically, we'll discuss the following tools for deploying your metadata:
- The Ant migration toolkit
- The Eclipse and MavensMate IDE deployment
- Change sets
- Packaging
When we talk about deployment on the Salesforce1 platform, we actually are talking about the tools and methods for copying or moving metadata from one instance to another. Typically, this is from a sandbox or development org to production. However, technically, refreshing your sandbox from production deploys production metadata back into a sandbox. Under that umbrella definition of deployment, there are really about four methods of moving that metadata. Two of these methods are rather coder focused, while the other two are more UI focused. Unfortunately, each of the tools has its own pros and cons, and often it's impractical to unequivocally state which one is the best. Some of them are, by their nature, perfect for quick deployments of one or two files, but tedious and frustrating when moving 1,500 files. Others work well with continuous integration tools and yet others are the least effort for IDE users. With that said, let's start with the Ant migration toolkit.