Before you configure Lifecycle Center, plan how your team works and what your release process looks like. The decisions you make during setup, such as how many pipeline stages to create, which environments to connect, and which source control provider to use, shape how effectively Lifecycle Center works for your organization.
Considerations to Set Up Lifecycle Center
Review requirements before setup. See Considerations to Set Up Lifecycle Center.
Evaluate Lifecycle Center in a Non-Production Org
You can evaluate Lifecycle Center in Developer Edition orgs, source-tracked Developer, Developer Pro sandboxes, or scratch orgs instead of production. See Evaluate DevOps Center in a Non-Production Org.
Identify and Manage Environments
Identify and prepare the orgs that you want to use for the pipeline (dev, pipeline stages, release).
- Create required source-tracked Developer or Developer Pro sandboxes.
- Create sandboxes (as needed) for pipeline stages, for example, integration, user acceptance testing, and staging.
- Get the login credentials for all environments, including the release environment, such as production.
- Add team members as users to each environment that they require access to.
Plan Your Project Strategy
Decide whether your team needs one project or multiple projects. Your project strategy affects visibility, release governance, source control structure, and how teams manage metadata and data dependencies. See Lifecycle Center Project Best Practices.
Plan Your Pipeline
A pipeline is the sequence of stages work items move through. Each stage has an environment and a branch. Plan how many stages you need and how branches are named. See Plan Your Pipeline.
Decide Your Source Control Provider
Lifecycle Center requires a source control provider to store and manage your team’s changes. Before you set up Lifecycle Center, decide which provider your organization uses.
Lifecycle Center supports GitHub and Bitbucket. Both providers offer the features that Lifecycle Center requires. If your organization already uses a source control provider, use that. We recommend using a single source control provider to maintain a unified source of truth for your team.
If your organization doesn’t currently use a source control, review and read the provider documentation to confirm it meets your requirements.
- Considerations to Set Up Lifecycle Center
Review these considerations before you set up Lifecycle Center. - Lifecycle Center Project Best Practices
Follow these best practices to plan your Lifecycle Center project. Project is a centralized workspace to manage and deploy a distinct collection of related work items. - Lifecycle Center Environments
Environments are the Salesforce orgs, such as sandboxes, scratch orgs, or production orgs, connected to your Lifecycle Center pipeline. Lifecycle Center uses different environment types for development, pipeline stages, and release. - Are You Sharing a Development Environment?
Changes are associated in Lifecycle Center with the development environment within a project. Therefore, we recommend that all developers have their own development environment. A single development environment can be connected to multiple work items.