Deployment using the Copado tool

There are various ways to perform deployment in salesforce as below,

1. Change Sets.
2. Eclipse IDE, VS Code and similar development tools.
3. Copado deployment tool etc.

 

How is Copado different from the rest of the other deployment tools?

1. Copado has an easy process of deployment because of its user story-centric deployment process.
2. We can easily resolve conflicts using the inbuild backend git tool.
3. Not need to create anything again and again for deploying the same changes in org.
4. It supports all metadata that are supported by Metadata APT to deploy.

Copado helps us to deploy quicker as well as smarter with fewer errors and no more repetitive manual tasks, also we have more fun deploying with Copado Salesforce. It also helps us to manage multiple projects in parallel while also decreasing the problem resolution time.

Copado features:

1. Day-to-Day deployment.
2. Better UI: Salesforce Copado has a very interactive UI and easy to Understand Continuous Integration.
3. Helpful Error Messages: During Deployment, Standard Changeset generated, also very helpful as well as meaningful messages generated.
4. Git Integration: Git is Working as expected, it processes all the data.
5. JIRA Ticket Integration.
6. Copado has a Version control feature.
7. Copado makes our Metadata deployment faster as well as better, Deploy data, profiles, permission sets, classes, components, triggers, translations, custom settings values etc.
8. We can deploy user stories with metadata, git commits, and deployment tasks.
9. Copado has Jira, Rally, VersionOne and also Agile Accelerator Integration.
10. Copado has the feature of “Auto Resolve conflict,” which helps us to speed up mergers.
11. Using the feature “Git Snapshot.” We can also compare the file differences between Git Branches.

 

Copado allows us to create deployment using various ways.

1. Creating deployment from the Deployment Tab
2. Creating deployment from User Story record
3. Creating deployment from a Promotion

Before creating a deployment, we should have created Source Org and the Destination org credentials. Let us take a look at each one of them below:

1. Creating deployment from the Deployment Tab.

While creating deployment using Deployment Tab, we have four different options:

Select an option according to your requirement. Click on Next you get the below screen.

Give your deployment name.

Select Source and destination org.

Add the required steps.

Save your deployment.

When you manually create the deployment, Copado automatically does not start deployment. We need to click on deploy or deploy all.

2. Creating deployment from User Story record.

When we deploy using the user story record, we need to select Promote and Deploy checkbox on the User Story record. It will trigger the creation of promotion and a deployment record will execute the deployment.

To check if our deployment is successful, click on Validate Changes to validate the deployment. Then you can go ahead and execute the deployment.

 

3. Creating deployment from a Promotion.

If we want to deploy using a promotion, follow the steps below-

We can create promotions by selecting user stories that we want to deploy. But the user stories we are selecting must have Ready to Promote flagged.

1. Go to the Selected User Stories section in the Promotion record.

2. Select the user stories which we want to deploy from the list of available user stories.

3. And then click on Create Deployment:

 

4. A pop-up window will appear next. This is where the test level that you want to apply against your deployment can be chosen.

To create a validation deployment, flag the Validation Only checkbox.

If required, we need to select the checkbox against Attach Deployment File option.

5. Then, click on Submit.
6. When you submit the deployment, the following actions are triggered:
7. A new promotion branch is created out of the destination branch with the name promotion/{promotion.name-deployment.name}. On creation, every feature branch against each of the promoted user stories is merged by Copado.
8. Copado creates a single Git Promotion step in the deployment.
9. If we have specified any manual steps on the user story, these will be added to the deployment.
10. Once the deployment is successfully done, the following will happen:
11. The promotion branch will be automatically merged into the destination branch, which is the branch related to the destination org in the pipeline.
12. If the name of the deployment contains: tag= x.y.z, Copado will create and push a Tag x.y.z. We cannot duplicate tags; the tag is added when eventually deploying to production, followed by merging into master.
13. The user stories in the promotion to which the deployment is linked will be moved to the next environment in the pipeline.
14. The checkboxes Ready to Promote and Promote and Deploy will be unchecked.

 

While we just discussed how to deploy via Copado, let’s quickly look at the pros and cons of the same.

 

Advantages of Copado

1. Deployments from one org to another org are great using Copado.
2. User stories will be synced with Copado, and accordingly, we can select and commit the data to the feature branch.
3. Git operations are performed very well to the repos.
4. We can track the deployments under user stories at which stage the deployment has reached.
5. It has an inbuilt apex test run and static code analysis, which can help the deployment and get the errors better.
6. Direct metadata can be selected from all the metadata, and changes can be committed accordingly.

 

Disadvantages of Copado

1. Back promotions are sometimes difficult and behave weirdly.
2. After the deployment to production next changes in the pull request shows all the changes from the previous release as well.
3. Cannot be used through mobile.

 

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