Illuminated Cloud/IntelliJ IDEA with GitHub

[John Lewis]

Hello,

I'm using Illuminated Cloud very successfully as a plugin within the IntelliJ IDEA IDE, working on several projects in parallel for a variety of clients.

One of these clients want me to "commit my changes frequently to GitHub" (I think, by 'commit' they actually mean 'push') and they generally use VS Code with certain extensions to do this. However, I find VS Code to be a relatively unproductive environment for salesforce.com development - mainly because it lacks IC's support for test execution.

One work-around used a few months ago was to do the work in IC with a VS Code project linked to the same (sandbox) Org and regularly do a full refresh of the VS Code project and, from there, create 'commits' and push them to github.com. This was obviously very wasteful of time and rarely 100% accurate.

So if there any way either to do the above entirely within IntelliJ IDEA or, preferably, simply by scripting? (as I'm using Windows I'd use PowerShell scripts, but could use Linux-style Bash scripts if necessary).

I was thinking possibly I could keep a clone of the github repository under a different directory and use a PS script to copy my changes/additions from the IC project to that directory and then commit/push the stuff into github.com.

Thanks in advance for any assistance.

John Lewis

[Scott]

Hi, John. All JetBrains IDEs include full first-class support for both Git and GitHub:

https://www.jetbrains.com/help/idea/using-git-integration.html

https://www.jetbrains.com/help/idea/github.html

You can also learn about which IDE project files--both core JetBrains and IC2--can (and IMO should) be committed to version control safely. So you shouldn't need any external tools to manage Salesforce projects in IC2 in a Git repo unless there's some adjunct process around the management of those files.

Regards,

Scott Wells

[John Lewis]

Scott, thanks. Obviously I can't ask you for support on IntelliJ idea, but do you know, for example, can a 'project' be created using VS Code and 'pushed' to Git and then 'pulled' (or 'cloned'?) into Illuminated Cloud based on IntelliJ IDEA?

i.e. am I wasting my time if I try to do that?

Regards

John Lewis

[Scott]

Hi. Yes, of course. Salesforce projects, both metadata format and source format, have a very well-defined on-disk format that's independent of the tooling used to work with it. If you check a project's contents into Git (or any VCS), it can be checked out, used, and managed by any tool. There are many teams out there that use heterogeneous tooling to work with the exact same project. That's one of the many nice things about a standard on-disk format and a well-supported remote storage/versioning mechanism.

Regards,

Scott Wells