[SalesForce] How to keep sandbox in sync with changes from other developers

We are a team of 9 developers, working on a large project and commits are made to master branch all the time.

When I needed to work on any new enhancement I used to pull everything from master branch and deploy all the metadata(I have package.xml file in my source folder with wildcard matches for all the metadata components whichever supported ) to my sandbox using ant command ant deployUnpackaged. It was almost like refreshing my sandbox.

The above strategy worked until the payload size for ant deployment increased more than 50MB and I started receiving this error ant deploy error – Maximum size of request reached

Workaround #1:
Pull metadata from master branch and look at what is changed and deploy only those components to my sandbox but it is taking too much time as I need to look at each commit from last time to list out the list of files and select those files.

Workaround #2:
Deploying chunks of data instead of keeping track of what is changed for ex: First deploy objects and then classes and then pages so on..
But the problem with this approach is the size of the pages folder alone is more than 50MB and I cannot deploy complete pages folder in one go.

I just want to know from the community if there is a better approach than what I am using currently?

Best Answer

Disclaimer: I work for Gearset.

You could use Gearset (http://gearset.com) - we built it for exactly this purpose! We do several things around tracking and migrating changes between orgs that might help in this scenario:

  • Daily scheduled comparisons to show org changes over time (great for auditing changes that have happened to an org since you last "refreshed", to catch those pesky production hot-fixes, etc.)
  • Comparisons with a deep understanding of the metadata (not just a straight xml diff - we break apart profiles into the constituent permissions, for example, and we do some dependency analysis to catch failures before you push a deployment)
  • Some batching in our API requests to avoid hitting the API limits
  • Really simple UI for picking changes that you want to deploy, from arbitrary org to arbitrary org (we use the metadata API behind the scenes - we automatically build the package.xml, destrictiveChanges.xml and the deployment package for you)
  • Full history of all of your deployments, including the actual deployment package zip files themselves for download

There are other features too, but those seem like the most helpful based on what you've asked. There's a free 30-day trial, we use oauth and you don't have to install anything in your org, so you can give it a go absolutely risk free. I hope that helps, and good luck! :)

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