Salesforce ANT Migration

Ant Migration tool is used to Create and Fetch Metadata to and from an organisation.  It's a  command-line utility by which one can upload and download Metadata components.

Benefits

1. Its very useful for creating repetitive deployment or may be a large number of components just by executing a command in an command line interface.
2. Useful for uploading test environment with a lot of configuration settings.
3. Manually creating Fields, Objects may take a huge amount of time when you create them by clicking with the salesforce interface. These fields can be created with one command in the Command line interface and using Package.xml file in which you specify the information about all the fields.
4. The Name of the components we can Deploy or retrieve are as follows:
   1. Custom Fields.
   2. Objects.
   3. Workflow rules.
   4. Apex Triggers.
   5. Apex Class.
   6. Visualforce Pages. Etc.

The Whole list is mentioned in this link: 

https://developer.salesforce.com/docs/atlas.en-us.api_meta.meta/api_meta/meta_types_list.htm

Installation

1. Download Force.com migration tool from your salesforce organisation.
   1. Go to Setup.
   2. Type “Tool” and Click on Force.com Migration tool & Toolkits.
   3. Go to the Following Link for downloading Ant:

https://gs0.salesforce.com/dwnld/SfdcAnt/salesforce_ant_36.0.zip

1. Add the bin directory to your path.
2. Set the ANT_HOME environment variable to the directory where you installed Ant.
3. Set the JAVA_HOME environment variable to the directory where the JDK is installed.
4. Run command in Command line Interface:   “ant -version” to check the version and confirm the installation.

Usage

1. Create three Files:
   1. Package.xml - Which consists the specifications for the components.

To read more Click Here.