Salesforce CLI Installation

Salesforce CLI which was earlier called as Salesforce DX CLI is a command line tool. It is heart of Salesforce DX feature. It is extensible, you can create plugins in case you find some functionality missing. See here (https://developer.salesforce.com/blogs/2018/05/create-your-first-salesforce-cli-plugin.html). Salesforce keeps enhancing the tool by adding new functionalities in its releases. It is very powerful and can be used to do following operations.

• Creating Scratch orgs
• Connecting to Developer Hub orgs, Scratch Orgs, Sandboxes, Developer Orgs, etc
• Creating code like apex classes, Visualforce pages, lightning component etc.
• Getting the source code from scratch orgs, sandboxes, and developer orgs into local machine and pushing updated code to these orgs.
• Creating packages, package installations etc.

In order to get started with Salesforce DX, we must install the Salesforce CLI. The tool can be downloded from https://developer.salesforce.com/tools/sfdxcli. It is available for Windows, Mac OS and Linux.

We will see the process of installation on Windows.

Click on the "Download for Windows 64" link, which will download the CLI installation file on your machine. Click on the installation file, it will start the installation process prompting you to select the components. Keep the default selected and click next.

Now select the path where you want to install the CLI. You can keep the default path, click next to continue.

The installation process will start copying the files to your file system. It will take some time for installation to finish. Once the installation is finished, you can check if the installation is completed successfully by running the sfdx --version command on the command prompt. On successful run of the command, you will see the version number printed on the command line. Run the cmd command from Windows -> Run. In future blog posts, we will see how to use the tool.