We're removing the salesforcedx aggregator plug-in soon

[jshackell-sfdc]

We plan to remove the salesforcedx plug-in from Salesforce CLI in the coming months. Don’t worry, we’re not removing any functionality! The salesforcedx plug-in doesn’t do much; it simply aggregates other ones that contain the commands for creating scratch orgs, deploying source, and so on. The CLI itself is already an aggregator plug-in. So in the spirit of simplicity, we’re removing the unnecessary salesforcedx plug-in.

To prepare for this change:

• If you previously installed a tagged version of salesforcedx in your CLI, such as with the sfdx plugins:install salesforcedx@latest-rc command, remove that version with this command:

  sfdx plugins:uninstall salesforcedx

  If you want to install and test the release candidate, run this command instead:

  sfdx update stable-rc

• Remove the sfdx plugins:install salesforcedx command from your scripts.

Until we completely remove salesforcedx from Salesforce CLI, you'll still see it in your list of plug-ins, such as in the sfdx plugins --core output. We'll announce the exact date we plan to remove it, after which you'll no longer see it listed.

We're also updating the Salesforce CLI Setup Guide to no longer mention the salesforcedx plug-in.

[yippie]

In the new install method, how do I install a specific version?

In CI we do sdfx plugins:install [email protected] to ensure a stable would the syntax just be sfdx update 51.1.1 ?

[mshanemc]

@yippie
npm-based installs have it easy npm install -g [email protected] and that's what I'd recommend for CI. Those numbers are on the weekly release notes.

We're working on a way to make it simpler to find older versions of the CLI installers/tarballs so you can install exactly what you want that way, too.

[yippie]

We don't use npm install because we have been burned by it badly in the past. Typically it is behind, which for this use case isn't a big deal. But more importantly it did not properly pin its dependencies causing ALL versions to break in out CI, with no work around, when a dependency published a breaking version update.

Pinning the tar to a specific version of both the cli and salesforcedx plugin set would be ideal because we have also had issues where the latest cli version had issues that installing a version of salesforcedx plugin did not work around

[mshanemc]

@yippie and others...please see this week's release notes for details about using older versions. Those files are live now, and we'll get them added to the dev guide soon.
https://github.com/forcedotcom/cli/tree/main/releasenotes#51140-may-27-2021---cli-71030