Help¶
The course and the tools are free¶
Everything this course teaches is open source. The sfdx-hardis CLI and the VS Code extension that runs it are published under the AGPL-3.0 licence, on GitHub, and cost nothing to use: hardisgroupcom/sfdx-hardis and hardisgroupcom/vscode-sfdx-hardis. The labs you are reading, their screenshots and the Helios Energy project they are built on live in hardisgroupcom/sfdx-hardis-training, under the same terms. There is no paid version of the product waiting behind a page of this course, and no paid version of the course.
Both come from Cloudity, a Salesforce consulting company. Cloudity built sfdx-hardis for its own delivery teams, releases it in the open, and keeps maintaining it there. Anyone can open an issue or a Pull Request, and a good part of what ships each month started as somebody's bug report.
When a step of the course does not work¶
- Open the If it goes wrong block of the step. It lists the two or three ways that step usually fails, and what to do about each.
- Leave a comment at the bottom of the page. Every page of this course ends with a comment box, backed by GitHub Discussions: say which step, what you clicked and what you saw. That is the fastest way to get the page fixed, and it helps the next person on the same step.
- For the product rather than the course, read the sfdx-hardis documentation and search the issues before opening one.
When the course changed after you forked¶
The lab pages are always current: you read them on this site. What your fork holds is fixed on the day you forked it: the scripts behind the Training menu, the teammate stories of Simulate my teammates, the rules of Check my work and the project configuration. When the course adds a lab or fixes one of those, your fork does not get it on its own.
Every training command tells you when that happened: it checks your fork against the course first, and says how many changes you are missing. Where am I? always shows it. Changes to the lab pages, the translations, the site and the badges of other learners are left out, since you read them here and they change nothing your fork runs.
To bring the changes in, click Update my course in the Training menu of your level, and wait
for it to finish. It merges the course into a branch of its own, made from your integration, and
opens a Pull Request into integration, like every change in this course. Then it waits for the
checks of that Pull Request, merges it with a merge commit, never a squash, and brings the result
to the branch you are on. There is nothing to click in between, and your work is kept.
If a check fails, the command stops before merging and gives you the link of the Pull Request. Once that is sorted out, click Update my course again: it picks the same Pull Request up.
If the course and you changed the same file, the command stops, undoes everything and names the
files. Then either Reset this level, which starts the level again from its current state and
throws away your work on integration in that level, or merge by hand the way
Lab 2.7 solves a conflict.
Help on a real project¶
This course runs on a fictional company, with free orgs and a repository you create for yourself. A real project brings what no course can hand you: an org with ten years of history in it, a team that has to keep shipping while the pipeline is being built, and a release calendar. Cloudity does that work as a service, on top of the same open-source product this course teaches.
- Setup. Your team drives and a Cloudity expert reviews the branch model, the pipeline and the configuration, or Cloudity sets the whole pipeline up on your Git platform and hands it over.
- Training. Sessions for contributors, release managers and project leads, and the change management that makes a new way of working stick.
- Support. A subscription that keeps a Cloudity expert reachable after go-live, with priority on deployment incidents, and a release manager as a service when you have nobody in the seat.
Support is what keeps sfdx-hardis maintained¶
sfdx-hardis is free to use. It is not free to maintain. Three Salesforce releases a year, metadata types that change shape, APIs that move under the product, bugs found by teams deploying to production on a Friday: somebody has to do that work, week after week, and at Cloudity that somebody is paid to.
Support subscriptions are what pays for it, and for this course being free. If your team runs its deliveries on sfdx-hardis, a subscription is the most direct way to keep the project alive and moving, and it puts your feature requests in front of the people who decide what ships next.