What Is a Scratch Org?

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A Salesforce Scratch Org is a disposable and temporary Salesforce environment that can be quickly created, modified, and deleted to support agile development and testing workflows. Scratch orgs are lightweight, self-contained instances of Salesforce that provide developers with a clean slate to work on specific features, projects, or user stories without impacting production or other development environments.

Spin up a new scratch org when you want to:

Start a new project.
Start a new feature branch.
Test a new feature.
Start automated testing.
Perform development tasks directly in an org.
Start from “scratch” with a fresh new org.

Things not included in a scratch org are:

Custom objects, fields, indexes, tabs, and entity definitions
Sample data
Sample Chatter feeds
Dashboards and reports
Workflows
Picklists
Profiles and permission sets
Apex classes, triggers, and pages

A scratch org is a dedicated, configurable, and short-term Salesforce environment that you can quickly spin up when starting a new project, a new feature branch, or a feature test.

Purpose:

Scratch orgs are primarily used for developing and testing Salesforce applications and customizations in a controlled and isolated environment.

They facilitate agile development practices by providing developers with a fresh, customizable Salesforce environment for each development task or user story.

Key Features:

Disposable: Scratch orgs are temporary and disposable, meaning they can be created, modified, and deleted as needed without affecting other environments.

Self-Contained: Each scratch org is self-contained and isolated from other Salesforce instances, ensuring that changes made in one scratch org do not impact other environments.

Customizable: Developers can configure scratch orgs with specific features, settings, and data to match the requirements of their development tasks.

Source-Driven Development: Scratch orgs are designed for source-driven development using Salesforce DX, allowing developers to push and pull Salesforce metadata and source code between their local development environment and scratch orgs.

Lifecycle:

Create: Developers can create scratch orgs using tools like Salesforce CLI or the Salesforce Developer Hub UI.

Develop: Developers work on customizations, code, and configurations in the scratch org, leveraging features like Apex, Visualforce, Lightning Web Components, and declarative tools.

Test: Developers can run automated tests, manual tests, and user acceptance tests (UAT) in the scratch org to validate changes and ensure quality.

Deploy: Once development and testing are complete, changes can be deployed to other environments such as sandboxes or production orgs using Salesforce DX commands or deployment tools.

Use Cases:

Feature Development: Developers use scratch orgs to develop new features, enhancements, or customizations in isolation before deploying them to production.

Testing: QA engineers and testers use scratch orgs to perform functional testing, regression testing, and integration testing of Salesforce applications.

Training and Demos: Trainers and educators use scratch orgs to create customized environments for training sessions, workshops, or product demonstrations.

Benefits:

Agility: Scratch orgs enable agile development practices by providing developers with on-demand environments for rapid prototyping, development, and testing.

Isolation: Scratch orgs isolate development work from other environments, reducing the risk of conflicts, dependencies, and unintended consequences.

Consistency: Developers can define and configure scratch orgs using source code and configuration files, ensuring consistency across development environments and automating environment setup. 

Salesforce References

Scratch Orgs

Manage Scratch Orgs

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