How Salesforce ant deployment scripts changed our lives. Aka no more outbound changeset.

1. Continuous delivery
with Ant and
Salesfroce
How to escape from the outbound changeset

2. Continuous delivery
● Software engineering approach in which teams produce software in short
cycles, ensuring that the software can be reliably released at any time. It aims
at building, testing, and releasing software faster and more frequently. (
Wikipedia )
● SF provides inbound and outbound change sets.
○ Suitable for very small independent component
○ Hard to use if you have to deploy hundreds of components that depends on each others

3. Deploy with inbound/outbound changeset
From salesforce documentation:
1. From Setup, enter Outbound Changesets in the Quick Find box, then select Outbound Changesets.
2. If a splash page appears, click Continue.
3. In the Change Sets list, click New.
4. Enter a name for your change set, for example, HelloWorldChangeSet, and optionally a description. Click Save.
5. In the Change Set Components section, click Add.
6. Select Apex Class from the component type drop-down list, then select the MyHelloWorld and the HelloWorldTestClass classes from the list and click Add
to Change Set.
7. Click View/Add Dependencies to add the dependent components.
8. Select the top checkbox to select all components. Click Add To Change Set.

4. Deploy with inbound/outbound changeset
Too many steps
Error prone because you should remember all the new components and the
dependencies
Perform login twice ( one in develop and one in production )
Waiting ( indefinitely ) for change set upload
Too many clicks!!

5. Deploy with Ant
1. “Hard” to configure but easy to use
Java 7 or newer
Ant 1.5 or newer
Force.com Migration Tool
2. Few steps to make a full deploy
3. One requirement:
Write a complete ( for your needs ) package.xml

6. Deploy with Ant

7. Our deployment script