@salesforce/kit

What is @salesforce/kit?

The @salesforce/kit npm package is a utility library designed to help developers interact with Salesforce environments in a more streamlined and efficient manner. It provides a set of tools and functionalities that simplify common tasks related to configuration, environment handling, and other utilities necessary for Salesforce development.

What are @salesforce/kit's main functionalities?

Configuration Management

This feature allows developers to aggregate and manage configuration settings from various sources. The code sample demonstrates how to create a ConfigAggregator instance and retrieve configuration information.

const { ConfigAggregator } = require('@salesforce/kit');

async function getConfig() {
  const config = await ConfigAggregator.create();
  console.log('Loaded config:', config.getInfo());
}
getConfig();

Environment Detection

This feature helps in detecting and managing different environment settings. The code sample checks if the application is running in a production environment using an environment variable.

const { env } = require('@salesforce/kit');

if (env.getBoolean('IS_PRODUCTION')) {
  console.log('Running in production mode');
} else {
  console.log('Running in development mode');
}

Other packages similar to @salesforce/kit

jsforce

Jsforce is another popular npm package for Salesforce development. It primarily focuses on Salesforce API connections and data manipulation, providing a robust set of features for interacting directly with Salesforce data. Unlike @salesforce/kit, which is more about configuration and environment management, jsforce offers extensive capabilities for CRUD operations, querying, and streaming API support.

nforce

Nforce is also tailored for Salesforce development but is more lightweight compared to jsforce. It provides essential functionalities for authentication, data manipulation, and streaming but with a simpler interface. While @salesforce/kit focuses on configuration and environment aspects, nforce provides basic tools for direct Salesforce API interaction.

README

Utilities for Salesforce CLI development

What is this?

A collection of commonly needed utilities used by the Salesforce CLI and the libraries it is built on. It includes high level support for parsing and working with JSON data, interacting with environment variables, a common error base type, a minimal lodash replacement, and support for commonly needed design patterns, among other things. It is intended specifically for use in Node.js (version 8 or newer) projects -- YMMV in the browser.

see the API documentation for more details on each of the utilities that kit provides.

References

This library depends upon another Salesforce TypeScript library, @salesforce/ts-types. The API documentation for this library refers to several types that you will find in ts-types. Some lodash replacement functions are also found in ts-types.