The Silver Lining

You Shall Not Pass!

There are a number of ways to authenticate with the Force.com Platform and I thought I’d create a few lightning posts documenting my findings for each.

The first method in this series will be logging in through the web interface. There are 2 sites that you would hit in order to authenticate:

1. http://login.salesforce.com – for Developer Edition and Production Orgs
2. http://test.salesforce.com – for all other sandboxes

If you’re not able to log in with a username and password that you know is correct then the first port of call is to check that you’re using the correct URL above. I’ve seen many developers forget to hit ‘enter’ after swapping “test” for “login” (or vice versa) and then being puzzled because their credentials still didn’t work so don’t forget (okay by “many developers” I actually mean me).

There’s also a neat trick that’s quite well-known and can be used to log you in automatically based on bookmarked URLs. All you need to do is append 2 URL parameters onto the appropriate environment HTTPS URL e.g. I could create a bookmark with the URL https://test.salesforce.com?un=wes@cloud-corporation.com&pw=abc123 where:

• un = your username for that environment
• pw = your password for that username

Pro-tip: Make sure that the URL is using HTTPS.

If you exclusively use Chrome you might want to use the Force.com Logins plug-in which will save you some hassle.