Salesforce DX Developer Guide

How Salesforce Developer Experience (DX) Tooling Changes the Way You Work
Provide Developers Access to Salesforce DX Tools
Project Setup
Authorization
Metadata Coverage
Scratch Orgs
Sandboxes
Track Changes Between Your Project and Org
Work with Data
Salesforce DX MCP Server and Tools
Development
Develop Against Any Org
Assign a Permission Set
Create Lightning Apps and Aura Components
Create Lightning Web Components
Create an Apex Class
Create an Apex Trigger
Create a Custom Object
Execute Anonymous Apex
Run Apex Tests
Build and Release Your App
Unlocked Packages
Continuous Integration
Troubleshoot Salesforce DX
Limitations for Salesforce DX
PDF

Note: This release is in preview. Features described here don’t become generally available until the latest general availability date that Salesforce announces for this release. Before then, and where features are noted as beta, pilot, or developer preview, we can’t guarantee general availability within any particular time frame or at all. Make your purchase decisions only on the basis of generally available products and features.

Create an Apex Class

You can use Salesforce CLI to create Apex classes in your local Salesforce DX project. The generated class files live in a classes directory in a package directory of your project.
  1. Open a terminal (macOS and Linux) or command prompt Windows and change to your Salesforce DX project directory.
  2. Create the classes directory in the location you want to generate the Apex class. For example, if you want to generate it in the default package directory, create the force-app/main/default/classes directory if it doesn’t exist.
  3. Create the Apex class; specify the class name with the --name flag and the classes directory with the --output-dir flag. 
    1sf apex generate class --name myClass --output-dir force-app/main/default/classes

The command generates two files:

  • myClass.cls-meta.xml—metadata file
  • myClass.cls—Apex source file

By default, the command creates an empty Apex class. However, you can select different templates, depending on what you’re creating, by specifying the --template flag.

Template Description More Information in Apex Developer Guide
DefaultApexClass (default) Standard Apex class. Classes
ApexException Use Apex built-in exceptions or create custom exceptions. All exceptions have common methods. Exception Class and Built-in Exceptions
ApexUnitTest Use the @isTest annotation to define classes and methods that only contain code used for testing your application. isTest Annotation
InboundEmailService Use email services to process the contents, headers, and attachments of inbound email. Apex Email Service

This example selects the ApexException template.

1sf apex generate class --name myException --template ApexException --output-dir force-app/main/default/classes

Use the project deploy start command to deploy the new Apex class to your org.

1sf project deploy start --metadata ApexClass:myClass