Salesforce

How to Set Up a Salesforce Development Environment?

Having Salesforce service is a proven great help. But that’s not all. Demand to develop is a never-ending thirst that leads to more improvement integration.

If you are not familiar with Salesforce Development Services yet, a surprise is waiting for you with several options available.

You cannot perceive the benefits before employing a service. Let’s know together with how to set up a salesforce development environment and start a new journey.

Setting up Salesforce Development Environment

The process may be new for you but much easier than you guessed. Here, first comes the installation of multiple tools and then setting them up.

Note:  The article will be compatible with setting the tool in Windows 10, basically. For using iOS and Ubuntu, the process would be barely different.

Tools required for the setup

  • Salesforce CLI
  • Visual Studio Code
  • Java SDK 8 or 11

Downloading them is not a big deal. Just search in your desktop’s default or any search engine and install them like regular other tools. Don’t forget to update a tool to the latest version if your download is an older version.

You may also install another tool- Git, but that’s not compulsory.

Visual Studio Code Set up
You will find a bundle of handy options which you don’t think of from Visual Studio Code. Installing the ‘Salesforce Extension pack’ is a prerequisite for working with Salesforce.

Now, let’s get to the main work. Open Visual Studio Code. Search ‘Salesforce Extension Pack’ and download, then install it. With this, there will be several extensions added. That will do the integration of Salesforce and Visual Studio Code.

As the installation is done by enabling the Salesforce extensions, our next move will be extension’s configuration for using Java.

  • Follow the serial File> Preference> Settings
  • Go to the User tab and expend the Extensions. Then click on Salesforce Apex Configuration.
  • Now, check for Java: Home setting
  • Put the location where you have your java installed (Example, C:\\Program Files\\Java\\jdk-11.0.6).

Salesforce Project Set up

Before starting work in Salesforce development, a Salesforce project needs to be created in Visual Studio Code. To do that-

  • Open Command Palette by Ctrl+Shift+P, or you can go to the View and then Command Palette.
  • Then comes creating a project. There are 2 ways to do that.
    a. SFDX: Create Project

             b. SFDX: Create Project with Manifest (In this article, we selected this one)

  • Choose Standard Project.
  • Give your project a name.
  • For saving project, choose a location.

There are some mentionable folders and files.

  1. force-app/main/default
  2. sfdx-project,json
  3. manifest/package.xml
  • Now, connect to a Salesforce org.
  • Open Command Palette, enter SFDX: Set a Default Org.
  • Select SFDX: Authorize an Org.
  • Select a login URL for Salesforce.org. We are using Sandbox here.
  • Enter an alias. Then press Enter. A new window will appear for login to your Salesforce.org. Log in.
  • After login, go back to Visual Studio Code. If it appears ‘Successfully authorized’, you can close the browser.
  • Check if you find the Org alias name at Visual Studio Code’s bottom bar. You will see the alias once you run SFDC: Set a Default Org. By that, you can swap between different orgs. freely.

More ideas on Salesforce Development Environment

We all know that the salesforce development environment is for developing the apps. You’ll find 2 types of development environments- Sandbox and Developer Edition.

Developer Edition (DE) would be a good choice for the development environment, which is in the initial stage. It’s also a good support for building applications for Salesforce production environments.

Sandbox is like another type of environment in Salesforce- Production Environment. It can add configurations or data or both. 

There are multiple sandboxes for different purposes. The fundamental difference between the sandbox and DE is that- Sandbox is available to Unlimited Edition customers, while DE comes with less storage and users.

Last Words

Salesforce brings multiple options and opportunities to enhance the performance of an organization. In that sense, how to set up a salesforce development environment could be a new beginning.

Surprisingly this intense and effective tool is not so tough to learn. One can become a master after a couple of weeks. So, we can end this discussion by suggesting you keep thinking about getting more out of this outstanding CRM service tool.

Christophe Rude
Christophe Rude
Articles: 15880

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