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Push Source Faster with the Salesforce CLI and VS Code

Introduction

When working with SalesforceDX scratch orgs and VS Code, deploying source is as simple as opening the command palette and choosing the correct command. If there are errors, these are captured in the problems view and I can simply click on the problem to open the file:

Not too arduous right? Actually, it can be, especially when I’ve been on a train or plane and done a bunch of offline work that I’m then trying to deploy. After about a thousand push, fix, repeat cycles, opening the menu and choosing an option seems slow.

Configuring the Default Build Task

Note: this isn’t the way you want to do it when pushing source to a scratch org - it is for the metadata API and it’s also a useful thing to understand. I’m trying to build some suspense really.

As I’ve written before, I can configure any shell command as the default build task in VS Code.

To set up source push as the default, I :

• open up the command palette and choose ‘Tasks: Configure Default Build Task’
• choose ‘Create tasks.json file from template'
• choose ‘Other’

I then replace the contents of the tasks.json file with :

{
    "version": "2.0.0",
    "tasks": [
        {
            "label": "build",
            "command": "sfdx",
            "args": [
                "force:source:push"
            ],
            "group": {
                "kind": "build",
                "isDefault": true
            }
        }
    ]
}

and I can now run the push as the default build task using the key sequence SHIFT+COMMAND+B (on a Mac):

There’s one downside to this and it’s quite a biggie - the problems view is empty so I have to look at the command output to figure the problem and manually locate the problem file and line. Luckily I can solve this relatively easily (it requires regular expressions so obviously there’s a number of attempts to get this right) by adding a problem matcher to parse the output and find any errors:

{
    "version": "2.0.0",
    "tasks": [
        {
            "label": "build",
            "command": "sfdx",
            "args": [
                "force:source:push"
            ],
            "problemMatcher": [
                {
                    "owner": "KAB-apex",
                    "fileLocation": [
                        "relative",
                        "${workspaceFolder}"
                    ],
                    "pattern": {
                        "regexp": "^(.*)  (.*) \\((\\d+):(\\d+)\\)$",
                        "file": 1,
                        "line": 3,
                        "column": 4,
                        "message": 2
                    }
                },
                {
                    "owner": "KAB-lc",
                    "fileLocation": [
                        "relative",
                        "${workspaceFolder}"
                    ],
                    "pattern": {
                            "regexp": "^(.*) \\s \\w*:(\\w*:)(\\d+),(\\d+):\\s(.*)$",
                            "file": 1,
                            "line": 3,
                            "column": 4
                    }
                }
            ],
            "group": {
                "kind": "build",
                "isDefault": true
            }
        }
    ]
}

Now the problems view is populated again, so I have the same functionality with shortcut to kick the deployment off:

The Easy Way

Replacing the default build task is something that I’ve been doing on most of my projects to wire in a node script that manages deployments via the Metadata API. In that scenario I didn’t have any other options, but in this case it felt like I was having to recreate a lot of things to replace standard functionality. It felt like I should be able to create a shortcut to the entry in the command palette, but every time I googled I only got results around binding keyboard shortcuts to tasks.

A long time after I’d given up, I was looking to create a regular keyboard shortcut and opened the menu Code -> Preferences -> Keyboard Shortcuts and absent-mindedly typed ‘SFDX’ into the resulting screen, probably because it reminded me of the command palette:

The set of SFDX commands appeared! Scrolling down I found the source push command, and hovering over this showed a ‘+’ button that allowed me to define a shortcut key sequence - I choose SHIFT+OPTION+P:

Having configured this, I can now push the source simply by pressing that key combination, and I haven't had to replace any of the standard functionality:

As mentioned earlier, I’ve looked for a way to do this a number of times and had no luck - why that is the case I don’t know, but at least I got there in the end! As long as I don’t think about how much time I could have saved, it’s fine.

Related Posts

• Apex Snippets in VS Code
• Exporting Metadata with the Salesforce CLI
• SFDX and the Metadata API Part 4 - VS Code Integration
• SFDX and the Metadata API Part 3 - Destructive Changes
• SFDX and the Metadata API Part 2 - Scripting
• SFDX and the Metadata API 

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