Introduction

Whatever customization or configuration we do in Salesforce is stored as metadata.

Metadata is nothing but data about data. It gives information about other data.

There are various ways of migrating metadata. Choosing from them depends on numerous factors like the complexity or the metadata itself.

What is Metadata Migration?

Metadata migration is moving metadata from one instance and deploying it to another instance. In other words, deploying components from one instance to another is metadata migration.

Methods to Deploy Metadata

There are multiple ways through which we can deploy our changes in Salesforce.

1. Change Sets

Change Set is the simplest way to migrate metadata in Salesforce because this just needs points and clicks to deploy the changes.

We need not write any code or commands which ultimately give the power to Admins.

Steps to migrate changes:

• Build a connection between the source and the target environment
• Create an Outbound Change Set
• Add changes to the outbound change set we just created.
• Upload the outbound change set to our target instance
• Now, we can see our changes in Inbound Change Set
• Deploy this Change Set

2. ANT Tool for Migration

With the help of this, we can do direct deployment using Metadata API.

We need JDK, Jar, and ANT files to use the ANT tool, which makes the deployment process seamless for large sets of components.

This tool moves the metadata between a local directory and a Salesforce org using deploy() and retrieve() calls.

Steps for changes in migration

• First, retrieve metadata from the sandbox using this tool
• Command Line Interface (CLI) will be used by the developer to build a code package with mandatory changes
• Deploy the metadata to the production environment using the tool.