Force CLI Part 1 - Getting Started

Introduction

In one of my earlier blog posts around Lightning Components deployment (Deploying Lightning Components - Go Big or Go Missing) I made a passing reference to the fact that I use the Force CLI for automated deployments. A few people contacted me after this and said that while they were vaguely aware of the CLI, they’d never spent any time with it, so I decided to show this unsung hero some love with a series of blog posts.

A Command Line Interface to Force.com!

As someone who spent 20 or so years developing on Unix and Linux, I’m pretty comfortable with command line tools, and in many cases (resolving git conflicts!) I actually prefer them to a GUI. So when the CLI was released at Dreamforce 13, I couldn’t wait to get hold of it.

Downloading

The first thing to do is download the CLI - you can do this from the home page at : https://force-cli.heroku.com/ - this has pre-built binaries for Mac OSX, Windows and Debian/Ubuntu. I’m a Mac user so any instructions/examples are based on OSX.

Clicking on the ‘Download for Mac OS X 64’ link downloads the ‘force’ application to my ‘Downloads’ directory. I clear this directory out regularly (yeah right, regularly being when I run out of disk space) so the first thing I need to do is move this to a safe place. I create a tools directory underneath my home directory and drag the file into that:

Trying it Out

Via the terminal (If you aren’t familiar with the terminal then I’d recommend following this tutorial from MacWorld) I can then test out whether the application works correctly 

> cd ~/tools
> ./force

and of course it doesn’t:

-bash: ./force: Permission denied

This is because files are downloaded without execute permission. To rectify this, execute:

> chmod +x ./force

Executing again now shows the (long) list of available options:

> ./force

Usage: force  []
 
Available commands:
   login     force login [-i=] [ ]
   logout    Log out from force.com
   logins    List force.com logins used
   active    Show or set the active force.com account
   whoami    Show information about the active account
   describe  Describe the object or list of available objects
   sobject   Manage standard & custom objects
   bigobject  Manage big objects
   field     Manage sobject fields
   record    Create, modify, or view records
   bulk      Load csv file use Bulk API
   fetch     Export specified artifact(s) to a local directory
   import    Import metadata from a local directory
   export    Export metadata to a local directory
   query     Execute a SOQL statement
   apex      Execute anonymous Apex code
   trace     Manage trace flags
   log       Fetch debug logs
   eventlogfile  List and fetch event log file
   oauth     Manage ConnectedApp credentials
   test      Run apex tests
   security  Displays the OLS and FLS for a give SObject
   version   Display current version
   update    Update to the latest version
   push      Deploy artifact from a local directory
   aura      force aura push -resourcepath=
   password  See password status or reset password
   notify    Should notifications be used
   limits    Display current limits
   help      Show this help
   datapipe  Manage DataPipes
 
Run 'force help [command]' for details.

Access All Areas

By executing ‘./force’ I’m asking the operating system to execute the script named force in the local directory (the ./ part). This is going to be pretty unwieldy if I have to provide the location each time, so the last thing to do to get set up is to add the tools directory to my path - if you chose a different directory name to tools, just alter the following commands to use your name.

The default shell on OSX is bash (bourne again shell, as it was a replacement for the venerable Bourne shell - this is both a blog post and a history lesson!). When you login (or open a new terminal window on Mac OSX) the bash shell executes the .bash_profile script from your home directory, if one exists, so this is the easiest way to update your path. 

Using your favourite editor (mine is vim, but that’s a bit like saying the developer console is your favourite IDE), open the .bash_profile file, from your home directory (/Users/<yourname>), or create one if it isn’t already there and add the following at the bottom:

export PATH=$PATH:~/tools

Save the file, then execute the .bash_profile script to update your current context:

> . ~/.bash_profile

Next, change to your home directory and execute the force command without a path to check all is good:

> cd
> force

and once again you should see the full output.

Congratulations - now you can run the force executable from anywhere without worrying about where it has been installed.

Logging In

Now that everything is set up, you can login to Salesforce via the CLI by executing :

> force login

This opens up a browser window for you to enter your credentials: 

and authorise access via oauth:

(Note that this process involves a Heroku app communicating with a local web server to return the oauth token to the command line, which may be problematic if you are behind a firewall that you can’t configure or using NAT. See the end of this post for an alternative, non-oauth approach).

This is the number 1 reason why I use the Force CLI for deployments - it removes the need to store usernames and passwords on disk, which has always been my issue with the Force Migration Tool.

If you have a number of orgs its quite easy to forget which one you have logged into, which is where the logins command comes in handy, as it will show you all the orgs that you have logged in to and which login is currently active:

> force logins

Non-OAuth Authentication

If you can’t use the oauth mechanism described above, you can always fall back on supplying the username and password to the CLI via the following command:

> force login -u=<username> -p=<password>

While this is slightly better than storing credentials on disk, it does mean that if someone were to compromise your machine they’d be able to see the username and password in your command history. For example, after executing:

> force login -u=fake@fake.fake -p=Faking1t

If I then look at my command history

> history

This shows the credentials:

  685  force login -u=fake@fake.fake -p=Faking1t
  686  history

Luckily I can clean up afterwards and remove the command from my history, First delete the entry:

> history -d 685

then write the history to disk:

> history -w

viewing the history again shows that entry 685 has been replaced with the entry that was at 686:

685  history

Logging in to a Sandbox

The logins command supports production orgs, sandboxes and custom domains. To view the options, for this or any other command, execute ‘force <command> -help’:

> force login -help

Usage: force login

  force login [-i=<instance>] [<-u=username> <-p=password> <-v=apiversion]

  Examples:

    force login

    force login -i=test

    force login -u=un -p=pw

    force login -i=test -u=un -p=pw

    force login -i=na1-blitz01.soma.salesforce.com -u=un -p=pw

That’s all Folks

This concludes getting started with the Force CLI. Assuming all went well you now have the CLI installed, in your path and you’ve been able to login to an org. In the next post I’ll take a look at interacting with your metadata.

Related Posts

• Force CLI Part 2 - Extracting Metadata

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