Deploying Profiles and Fields with SFDX in VSCode

Profile deployment and tracking is hard, use permission set as @sfdcfox had mentioned.

Additionally having a version control system is a must with any software development, usually that is overlooked with salesforce development.

And CI-CD helps in automating all the manual tasks, there are many online tools like circle CI or Jenkins that is open source offers lot of configuration.

• Also look at the open source version CumulusCI that is build by Salesforce Org and offers great flexibility. David Reed has presented amazing session on that.

• Setting up continuous integration is easy, but to get it right as per your requirement or company takes sometime. Once setup, speeds up the whole development process and GIT offers nice history of changes in case something goes wrong.

• With CI-CD in place, additional benefit is that we can :

  • Integrate static code analysis with commits as well.
  • Have nightly jobs to run all unit tests for production in case tests fail.

Profiles only take on changes that are specified in the XML. If you don't specify a permission, it remains whatever it was before the deployment. This allows you to build incremental changes to permissions across multiple packages.

That said, as you move to DX, it may be time to start migrating towards Permission Sets instead. These are far more flexible, can be applied to many users at once, users can have more than one assigned to them, and they work better with packaging.