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Development Environment

In a Flxbl project powered by sfp, development follows a structured, iterative workflow designed for team collaboration and continuous delivery. This section guides you through the complete development lifecycle - from setting up your environment to submitting code for review.

Prerequisites

DevHub Access is Required for sfp development:

  • Building any type of package (source, unlocked, data)

  • Creating and managing scratch orgs

  • Resolving package dependencies

Ensure your Salesforce user has DevHub access by following Salesforce's DevHub setup guide.

The Development Flow

Development in an sfp project follows these key principles:

  1. Isolated Environments: Each developer works in their own sandbox or scratch org

  2. Source-Driven Development: All changes are tracked in version control

  3. Iterative Cycles: Developers continuously pull, modify, and push changes

  4. Automated Validation: Pull requests trigger comprehensive validation

  5. Review Environments: Stakeholders can test changes before merge

How Developers Work

Developers in an sfp project typically follow this pattern:

Starting a Sprint or Feature

  • Fetch a fresh environment from a pre-prepared pool

    • Scratch orgs: Can be fetched per story for maximum isolation

    • Sandboxes: Usually fetched at sprint start for longer-running work

  • Pull the latest metadata to sync with the org

  • Create a feature branch for version control

Daily Development Cycle

  • Pull changes from the org to stay synchronized

  • Make modifications to metadata and code

  • Push changes back to the org for testing

  • Run tests locally to validate functionality

  • Build artifacts to ensure packages are valid

Completing Work

  • Create a pull request with your changes

  • Automated validation runs via CI/CD pipeline

  • Review environment is created for acceptance testing

  • Merge after approval and successful validation

Environment Management

sfp provides powerful commands for environment management through pools:

Local Scratch Org Pools (Community Edition)

Pre-prepared scratch orgs managed locally via DevHub:

# Fetch a scratch org for your feature (aliases: pool:fetch)
sfp pool scratch fetch --tag dev-pool --alias my-feature \
  --targetdevhubusername mydevhub

Server-Managed Pools (sfp-pro)

Centralized pool management for both scratch orgs and sandboxes:

# Fetch an org instance from the server pool
sfp server pool instance fetch \
  --repository myorg/myrepo \
  --tag dev-pool \
  --assignment-id feature-123

# The same command works for both scratch orgs and sandboxes
# Pool type is configured at the server level

This pooling approach means developers spend less time waiting for environment creation and more time coding.

Source Synchronization

The foundation of sfp development is bidirectional source synchronization:

Pull Command

Retrieves changes from your org to local source:

  • Automatically handles text replacement reversals

  • Detects conflicts and provides resolution options

  • Suggests new replacements for hardcoded values

Push Command

Deploys local changes to your org:

  • Applies environment-specific text replacements

  • Handles destructive changes automatically

  • Supports various test execution levels

What's Next?

For a complete walkthrough of the development workflow with detailed commands and examples:

Development Workflow

For specific development tasks:

Pull Changes from your orgPush Changes to your org

For managing environments:

Pools

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