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Promote Changes Through Your Pipeline
Promotion moves your changes to the next stage in a Lifecycle Center pipeline. When you promote, Lifecycle Center first merges the changes from the current stage’s source control branch to the next stage’s branch, and then deploys them to the org associated with the next stage.
Required Editions
| Available in: Lightning Experience in Professional (API access required), Enterprise, Performance, Unlimited, and Developer Editions |
| Not available in: Government Cloud Plus. Contact your Salesforce account executive for more details. |
| Not available in: EU Operating Zone. EU Operating zone is a special paid offering that provides an enhanced level of data residency commitment. Lifecycle Center is supported in orgs in the EU that aren’t part of EU OZ, per standard product terms and conditions. |
How Promotion Works
A pipeline defines the sequence of stages that your changes move through as they progress from development to production. Each stage corresponds to an environment (a Salesforce org) and a branch in your source control repository.
Promotion is a two-step process:
- Merge: Lifecycle Center merges the changes from the current stage’s branch into the next stage’s branch.
- Deploy: Lifecycle Center deploys the merged changes to the org associated with the next stage.
If the deployment fails, Lifecycle Center doesn’t finalize the merge to the next stage’s branch. All branches remain in the state that they were in before you attempted the promotion.
Types of Promotion
Lifecycle Center supports these ways to promote changes through your pipeline.
- Stage promotion (recommended): Promote all the changes in a pipeline stage as a single, consistent unit to the next stage. Stage promotion makes releases more stable and predictable. See Promote Work Items.
- Custom promotion: Select and promote individual approved work items that are ready for the next stage, while other work items remain in their current stage until they’re ready. See Custom Promotion.
- External merge: Merge changes directly in your source control repository, and then complete the promotion by deploying the merged changes in Lifecycle Center or with Salesforce CLI. See External Merges.
- Validate-only deployment: Check a promotion before you run it. Lifecycle Center runs tests and validates the changes without saving them to the org, so you can confirm a successful deployment ahead of time. See Run a Validate-Only Deployment.
Before You Promote
Before your changes can move to the next stage, make sure they’re ready to promote.
- A work item must be approved and in Ready to Promote status. See Review Changes with Team Members.
- Changes must be mergeable. Lifecycle Center blocks promotion if there’s a merge conflict, a failed test, or an unmet mergeability rule or merge setting. See Mergeability Rules and Merge Settings.
- Lifecycle Center Testing runs the test suites assigned to the destination stage as a pre-promotion quality gate. A failed quality gate blocks the promotion. See Testing Before Promotion to the Next Stage.
- If Lifecycle Center detects a conflict, resolve it before you promote. See Conflict Detection and Resolution.
For the deploy and test choices available in the promotion dialog, see Promotion Options.
After You Promote
After a promotion runs, confirm the result in the pipeline and in Activity History. See Check Promotion Status and Deployment Details.
- Mergeability Rules and Merge Settings
Lifecycle Center blocks promotions if there’s a conflict, if a test failed, or if a mergeability rule or merge setting isn’t met. - Promotion Options
Select the promotion type, which changes to apply, and which Apex tests to run when you promote a stage or selected work items. - Promote Work Items
Move your work items through a predefined sequence of pipeline stages, guiding them from development to production. - Custom Promotion
Select and promote individual work items that are ready for the next pipeline stage by using custom promotion. - External Merges
Lifecycle Center detects external changes that you merge directly into a stage’s source control branch. - Check Promotion Status and Deployment Details
After a promotion completes, confirm the result from the pipeline, the work item record page, or Activity History. If the failure details don't provide enough information, review the deployment details in Setup. - Troubleshoot a Stalled Promotion
A promotion can stall while Lifecycle Center deploys changes to the target environment or merges changes into the target stage branch. Check the deployment and change request to determine where the promotion stalled, and then follow the appropriate recovery procedure.
