In this post, we’re going to work on how you can test and develop against Salesforce, using the Web-Server Flow, locally on your machine. As an added bonus, we’ll look at how to make those urls public with ngrok.

This post is going to be a rather lengthy introductory course on the Salesforce REST API. If you’re just looking for the Postman collection, or would like to just follow along, click here. We’ll discuss authentication, basic read operations, SOQL queries, batch & composite queries, and querying with an external key. We’ll also touch on the Salesforce workbench.

Many people have heard of Salesforce. Right now, you’re probably thinking of a web portal used by sales people to find new customers, maintain accounts, and track opportunities, and you’d be right to think that. Salesforce is a great platform for CRM, but it’s so much more than that.