Lightning Communities Developer Guide

Get Up to Speed with Lightning Communities
Develop Lightning Communities: The Basics
Customize the Look and Feel of a Lightning Template
Example: Build a Condensed Theme Layout Component
Develop Secure Code: LockerService and Stricter CSP
Analyze and Improve Community Performance (Developer Preview)
Community Migration, Packaging, and Distribution
Migrate Your Community with Change Sets
Considerations for Migrating Communities with Change Sets
Lightning Bolt Solutions: Build Once, Then Distribute and Reuse
PDF

Newer Version Available

This content describes an older version of this product. View Latest

Migrate Your Community with Change Sets

Use change sets to move your community between related orgs that have a deployment connection, such as your sandbox and production orgs. Create, customize, and test your community in your test environment and then migrate the community to production when testing is complete.
Available in: Salesforce Classic and Lightning Experience
Available in: Enterprise, Performance, Unlimited, and Developer Editions

User Permissions Needed
To customize or publish a community: Create and Set Up Communities
To edit deployment connections and use inbound change sets: Deploy Change Sets AND Modify All Data
To use outbound change sets: Create and Upload Change Sets, Create AppExchange Packages, AND Upload AppExchange Packages

You can use change sets to move both Lightning communities and Salesforce Tabs + Visualforce communities.

  1. Create and test your community in your preferred test org, such as sandbox.
  2. From Setup in your test org, enter Outbound Change Sets in the Quick Find box, and then select Outbound Change Sets.
  3. Create a change set, and click Add in the Change Set Components section.
  4. Select the Network component type, choose your community, and then click Add to Change Set.
  5. To add dependent items, click View/Add Dependencies. We recommend selecting all the dependencies listed.
    • For navigation menus that link to standard objects, custom list views aren’t included as dependencies. Manually add the custom list view to your change list.
    • The list of dependencies has two Site.com items—MyCommunityName and MyCommunityName1. MyCommunityName holds the various VisualForce pages that you can set for the supported page settings in Administration (in Workspaces or Community Management). MyCommunityName1 includes the pages from Community Builder.

    Tip

  6. Click Upload and select your target org, such as production.
    Make sure that the target org allows inbound connections. The inbound and outbound orgs must have a deployment connection.
  7. In your target org, create a community (if one doesn’t exist) with the same name and template version as the community in your source org.
    For Communities, you can only make updates with change sets, which means that you can’t create a community directly from an inbound change set.
  8. From Setup, select Inbound Change Sets and find the change set that you uploaded from your source org.
  9. Validate and deploy the change set to make it available in the target org.

    When you deploy an inbound change set, it overwrites the community in the target org. So although you can’t use a change set to delete a component, such as a community, you can delete the pages within the community. For example, let’s say you delete pages from a community in sandbox and then create an updated outbound change set. When you redeploy the change set in a target org, such as production, the pages are also deleted there.

    Warning

  10. Manually reconfigure the following items in your community.
    • Most Administration settings
    • Page variations and audience targeting
    • Navigational and featured topics
    • Languages
    • List views for Navigation Menu items that link to objects

    Until you publish your community in the target org, Navigation Menu items that point to community pages appear to be broken. Similarly, settings for the change password, forgot password, home, and login pages each appear to return to their default values.

    Note

  11. Add data for your community, and test it to make sure that everything works as expected. Then publish your changes to go live.