Salesforce DX Concepts: Projects and Org Authentication

A Salesforce DX project is a folder structured for source-driven development, anchored by an sfdx-project.json file at its root, which declares the project's package directories (commonly a folder named force-app). This is called source format — a human-readable, file-per-component layout — as opposed to the older metadata format (a single zipped package.xml bundle) that legacy tools like Change Sets still use.

sf org login web --alias myDevOrg

This opens a browser window for Salesforce's standard OAuth login flow. Once you log in, the CLI stores an authenticated session locally under the alias you chose. No password is ever stored in your project folder or committed to source control — authentication lives as local CLI session data on your machine, entirely separate from your codebase.

sf config set target-org=myDevOrg
sf org list
sf org display

Setting a default org means CLI commands don't need --target-org repeated on every call. sf org list shows every org you've authenticated to on this machine; sf org display shows details of your currently-set default.

Enterprise teams routinely work across multiple orgs at once — a personal scratch org, a shared QA sandbox, and eventually production. Aliases and explicit --target-org flags exist specifically to prevent a very real, very costly mistake: deploying to the wrong org because you forgot which one was set as default.