I want to use SGD plgin in ANT build.xml based pipeline

[Samikshadahe]

Hi scolladon,
is it possible if I implement SGD plugin in salesforce CICD using ANT build.xml,
if so how can I do that

[scolladon]

Hi @Samikshadahe !

I guess it would be possible, also I have never tried.
It's been a long time since I used ANT so I'm a bit rusty, not sure I can be of a great help here.

If you manage to get it done, please feel free to share it (either here or in a dedicated discussion)

[mehdicherf]

@Samikshadahe Salesforce Ant Migration Tool is fully retired now (see https://help.salesforce.com/s/articleView?id=release-notes.rn_deployment_ant_migration_tool_eol.htm&release=248&type=5).
You should consider migrating to Salesforce CLI for your deployments.

[marcosboger]

Giving my two cents here. I work with many project which are ANT based, meaning the metadata is in old MDAPI format and would deploy using ANT based workflows.

Recently, we adopted sfdx-git-delta with GitHub Actions to optimize our pipelines and we did a small trick to be able to use the plugin with ANT projects. The way we did it was:

• Create local project sf project generate --name tmp_src_project --template empty
• git init inside local project
• Convert MDAPI metadata to Source format and place it in the project
• git commit -m "Metadata before merge"
• Merge the branches locally
• Convert MDAPI metadata again to Source format and place it in the project
• git commit -m "Metadata after merge"
• Run the plugin command sf sgd source delta --to "HEAD" --from "HEAD~1" --output-dir "."
• Deploy the converted metadata based on the package.xml generated via SF CLI

This logic is running on a workflow which triggers via Pull Requests. That way, we could keep our repo in ANT format while still deploying via the plugin and SF CLI. It had its edge cases, but we can say it saved us a lot of time.

[drewski89]

@Samikshadahe
You can 100% use ANT as a deployment tool. As others have said, you'd still need to convert your metadata formatted repo to source format so you can use sfdx git delta. To be clear, you wouldn't be using the Salesforce .jar file for the deployment itself, you'd be using the sf/sfdx cli tools within ANT. Your build.xml file

Here are most of the steps:

1. Create new source formatted project (can be done in vscode with sfdx plugins (generate project with manifest) or via command line)
   `# Command line process

   change directory to the new project root (the folder right before force-app)

   cd /path/to/sfdx/project/root

   Convert your existing project from metadata format to source format

   sf project convert mdapi --root-dir /path/to/current/mdapi/formatted/repo
   `

2. Adjust your ANT scripts to use sfdx and sfdx git delta for deployments. You'd use ANT to run the CLI commands.

If you're using this with Jenkins (or manual execution) for example, you'd need to have a build.properties file with properties that Jenkins (or you) can set before executing the build. For example - targetOrg, fromCommit, toCommit.

To reiterate ANT is a tool that very much still works and can be used to deploy to Salesforce, just not using the .jar file that Salesforce used to provide.

If you have any questions I'd be happy to help you out where I can.